I have had this question in my mind for ages. You say that these counterfactual universes don’t actually exist. But, according to Many-Worlds, don’t all lawful Universes actually really really exist? I mean, isn’t there some amplitude for Mr. Oswald to not have shot Kennedy, and then you get a blob where Kennedy didn’t get murdered?
I’ve been banging my head against a wall on this and still can’t come to a conclusion. Are the decoherent blobs actually capable of creating multiple histories on the observable level, up here? It looks, to me, that they should be. I mean, if these particles have each an amplitude to “be” here and there, then there is some amplitude for the combination of all particles in the Universe to correspond to a completely different macro Universe.
On the other hand, that seems to also imply that there’s some amplitude for things like President Kennedy being shot, and then suddenly his wounds closed and he was up and running again. And that doesn’t sound okay at all.
But, according to Many-Worlds, don’t all lawful Universes actually really really exist?
Nitpick: All the Many-Worlds of QM still follow our particular set of physics. For “all lawful universes” to really really exist, you probably have to go to Tegmark IV or something like that....
Abstractions like probability and number are constructed by us; they don’t strictly exist, but it’s useful to act as though they do, since they help organize our reasoning. It could be that by coincidence that some part of the Real World corresponds precisely to the structure of our modal or mathematical reasoning; for instance, the many-worlds interpretation of QM could be true, or we could live in a Tegmark ensemble. But this would still just be an interesting coincidence. It wouldn’t change the fact that our abstractions are our own; and if we discovered tomorrow that a Bohmian interpretation of QM is correct, rather than an Everettian one, it would have no foundational implications for such a high-level, anthropocentric phenomena as probability theory.
Thinking in this way is useful for two reasons. First, it insulates our logical fictions from metaphysical skepticism; our uncertainty as to the existence of a Platonic realm of Number need not undermine our confidence that 2 and 2 make 4. Second, it keeps us from being tempted to slide down the slippery slope to treating all our fictions (like currency, and intentionality, and qualia, and Sherlock Holmes) as equally metaphysically committing.
Well, whether probability and number exist or not is moot. The point of fact is that when you look at any quantum system there is a probability of finding it in any given (continuous set of) state(s) equals the squared modulus of the amplitude for it to be in such state. As mr. Yudkowsky once put, and I paraphrase, “I still want to know the nonexistent laws that coordinate my meaningless Universe”.
And my point is: assuming Quantum Physics is completely correct, without us adding the additional postulates, do all combinations of universes exist, superposed to each other? That is to say: is the quantum suicide limited to 50⁄50 strictly quantised experiments, or does our consciousness live on in a forever branching multiverse? Sort of.
I just read Mr. Yudkowsky’s articles on Boltzmann Brains and the Anthropic trilemma… and I had thought of those questions a while ago. While they’re not directly related to this comment, I guess I should comment about them here, too.
I have no problem thinking of myself as a Boltzmann Brain. Since most (if not all) such Brains will die an instant after existing, I guess my existence could be accurately described as a string of Boltzmann Brains in different regions of spacetime, each containing a small (not sure how small) slice of my existence. Perhaps they all exist at the same time. And the Anthropic Principle would explain the illusion of continuity, somewhat. My main thoughts on the Boltzmann Brain idea is that any hypothesis that has no way to be tested even in principle is equivalent to the Null hypothesis. I guess what I mean is, if I found out right now, with P ~ 1, that my existence is a string of Boltzmann Brains, that would not affect my predictions. I’m not sure I should be thinking this… because this whole matter confuses the hell out of me, but that’s my current mental state.
As for the Anthropic Trilemma… well, I guess it pretty much means mr. Yudkowsky has the same doubts as I do. Very, very confusing business indeed. Sometimes I think I should just quit thinking and become a stripper. That was a joke, by the way.
I have had this question in my mind for ages. You say that these counterfactual universes don’t actually exist. But, according to Many-Worlds, don’t all lawful Universes actually really really exist? I mean, isn’t there some amplitude for Mr. Oswald to not have shot Kennedy, and then you get a blob where Kennedy didn’t get murdered?
I had the same reaction… Can this be the same Eliezer who authored the sequences, and gave such strong support for the reality of Many Worlds?
I was half-expecting the other shoe to drop somewhere in the article… namely that if you are prepared to accept that the Many Worlds really exist, it makes the Great Reductionist Project a whole lot easier. Statements about causality reduce to statements about causal graphs, which in turn reduce to statements about counterfactuals, which in turn reduce to statements of actual fact about different blobs of the (real) quantum state vector. Similarly, statements about physical “possibility” and “probability” reduce to complicated statements about other blobs and their sizes as measured by the inner product on the state space.
Maybe Eliezer will be leading that way later… If he isn’t I share your confusion.
It was mentioned that if you were to make a continuous analog of the Bayesian Network, you’d end up with space and time, or some such. Maybe if you have a probabilistic Bayesian Network you get QM out of it? As in, any given parent node has a number of child nodes, each happening with a certain probability… and then if you make the continuous analog of such you’ll get Quantum Mechanics and Many-Worlds.
Mr. Yudkowsky has thoroughly convinced me of the reality of Many-Worlds (and my ongoing study of Q.M. has not yet even suggested otherwise), so… so what, then?
I have read about Bohmian Mechanics before, and it failed to convince me. This article keeps talking about ‘non-determinism’ inherent to Q.M. but I’m pretty sure Relative State is quite very deterministic. Also, adding the specification of a particle’s position to a description doesn’t sound at all to me like the simplest explanation possible.
Maybe this is just me saying I prefer locality to counterfactual definiteness, but… Relative State still wins my favour.
This article keeps talking about ‘non-determinism’ inherent to Q.M.
Read: traditional Q.M. Arguments for BM and for MW are both largely still responding to Copenhagenism’s legacy of collapse theorists. The next stage in the dialectic should be for them to set aside the easy target of collapse and start going for each others’ throats directly.
Also, adding the specification of a particle’s position to a description doesn’t sound at all to me like the simplest explanation possible.
Does adding Magical Reality Fluid and an infinity of invisible Worlds sound simple, at the outset? MW seems simple and elegant because it’s familiar; this tempts us to forget just how much remains unresolved by the theory, and just how much it demands that we posit beyond the experimental observations. Let’s be careful not to let unfamiliarity tempt us into treating BM in an asymmetric way. Bell’s way of framing BM is very intuitive, I think:
“Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.”
Actually, I’m somewhat grateful that it was ignored (except by de Broglie), since its intuitiveness might otherwise have become such a firm orthodoxy that we wouldn’t have the rich debate between MW theorists of today. Given our human tendency to fix on our first solution, it is very useful that the weakest theory (collapse) is the one people started with.
Maybe this is just me saying I prefer locality to counterfactual definiteness
“Prefer” as in it sounds more elegant, or as in it seems more likely to be true? Untangling those two is the real problem. We also need to keep in mind that the MW style of locality is a rather strange one. (Consider MW theories on which worlds ‘split;’ does this conservation-of-energy-violating split propagate outward at the speed of light? What basis does it occur in?)
it failed to convince me. [...] Relative State still wins my favour.
Bayesian reasoning isn’t bivalent; our goal is not simply to pick the Best Option, but to try to roughly estimate how uncertain we should be. For instance, at this point should we assign a .4 probability to BM? .1? .005?
I’m not convinced of BM either, but I take it seriously as the main rival to the entire MW family of interpretations. I take Collapse interpretations far less seriously, not just because of their strange dualism but because they have more promise of being empirically verified (hence their lack of verification counts against them), whereas BM and MW don’t seem to be distinguishable. (Also, BM-style views predate Everett by decades, so one can’t make the case that BM is an ad-hoc distortion of MW.)
Does adding Magical Reality Fluid and an infinity of invisible Worlds sound simple, at the outset?
That’s not at all what Relative State states… it just states that the Schrödinger Equation is all there is, full stop. The existence of a number of worlds is a consequence, not an assumption.
Bell’s way of framing BM is very intuitive, I think:
“Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.”
Please forgive me if I misunderstand, but that sounds, to me, just a way of making wavefunctions fit into the intuitive “particle” and “wave” molds. And it also looks like it ignores the fact that people are made of particles (wavefunctions), so whatever effects of any given particle (wavefunction) are detected by us would cause us to be superposed. I don’t… really see a way out of being superposed at macroscopic level.
“Prefer” as in it sounds more elegant, or as in it seems more likely to be true? Untangling those two is the real problem. We also need to keep in mind that the MW style of locality is a rather strange one. (Consider MW theories on which worlds ‘split;’ does this conservation-of-energy-violating split propagate outward at the speed of light? What basis does it occur in?)
“Prefer” as in both sounds more elegant and seems, to me, more likely to be true. Also, the conservation of energy is never violated, I don’t think, since we already had to multiply the total energy by the normalised amplitude squared of the different states anyway.
Bayesian reasoning isn’t bivalent; our goal is not simply to pick the Best Option, but to try to roughly estimate how uncertain we should be. For instance, at this point should we assign a .4 probability to BM? .1? .005?
I’m sorry, you’re right. What I meant by “failed to convince me” and “wins my favour” is that I still assign a > .5 probability to MW, or any interpretation that doesn’t try to sneak away from macroscopic superposition, or tries to tell me physics is non-local. As I said, I have done my share of research on alternative interpretations of Q.M. after I started studying it (I’m not nearly done studying it, though) before, and the one that sounded to me the simplest was MW.
I’m not convinced of BM either, but I take it seriously as the main rival to the entire MW family of interpretations. I take Collapse interpretations far less seriously, not just because of their strange dualism but because they have more promise of being empirically verified (hence their lack of verification counts against them), whereas BM and MW don’t seem to be distinguishable. (Also, BM-style views predate Everett by decades, so one can’t make the case that BM is an ad-hoc distortion of MW.)
I guess I don’t take it seriously because, to my untrained eyes, it looks like a theory that’s trying to escape quantum effects affecting the macroscopic world by sticking macroscopic intuitions into the quantum world.
That’s not at all what Relative State states… it just states that the Schrödinger Equation is all there is, full stop. The existence of a number of worlds is a consequence, not an assumption.
Sure, but the theory with the simplest sound-bite axiomatization may not be the most parsimonious theory at the end of the day. And your confidence in that starting point will depend heavily on how confident you are in the prospects for extracting the Born probabilities from the Schrödinger equation on its lonesome. A theist will claim that his starting point is maximally simple relative to its explanatory power—heck, one of his axioms is that his starting point is maximally simple! that’s how simplicity works, right? -- but the difficulty of actually extracting normality from theism without recourse to ‘deep mysteries’ undermines the project in spite of its promising convergences with the data.
that sounds, to me, just a way of making wavefunctions fit into the intuitive “particle” and “wave” molds.
They aren’t intuitive molds, in the system-1 sense; ‘particle’ and ‘wave’ are theoretical constructs, and we understand them via (and import them from) structurally similar macro-phenomena. ‘Wave’ and ‘particle’ are sufficiently simple ideas, as macro-phenomena go, that they may recur at multiple levels of organization. I don’t assume that they must do so; but it’s at least an idea worth assessing, if the resultant theory recaptures the whole of normality without paradox or mystery.
And it also looks like it ignores the fact that people are made of particles (wavefunctions), so whatever effects of any given particle (wavefunction) are detected by us would cause us to be superposed.
The wave occurs at both positions (or with both spin components); the particle does not. Being made of particles, I have a determinate brain-state, not a superposed one; and I observe a determinate particle position, though the dynaymics of that particle (and of my brain-state) are guided by the wave function. Many Worlds seems to predict that I will both see a spin-up measurement result and a spin-down measurement result, when I observe the superposed state. But in fact I seem to either see spin-up or spin-down, not both. So at this simple stage, Bohm correctly predicts our observation, and Many Worlds does not. That’s why the challenge for Many Worlds is to make sense of the probabilistic element of QM. The Schrödinger dynamics leave no room for probability; they are, as you note, deterministic.
A multiverser may respond: ‘But we’ve come so far! We’ve made such progress! Surely we deserve to be treated as the standard view by this point. All that’s left is the small problem of explaining the emergence of the real.’ The Copenhagenist and Bohmian hear this, and they think: But accounting for our actual observations is the whole game. If you’ve succeeded in every task except actually predicting the Born probabilities, then what have you in fact gained, aside from a string-theory-style edifice of elegant abstraction? There’s the rub.
it looks like a theory that’s trying to escape quantum effects affecting the macroscopic world by sticking macroscopic intuitions into the quantum world.
I understand your impulse, but it’s not as though we have a cache of ‘non-macroscopic intuitions’ to employ in lieu of our macroscopic ones. What we have are some elegant formalisms, which relate to our observations in puzzlingly regular-but-nonlinear ways (the Born probabilities, the Projection Postulate). We then try to figure out what our elegant formalism is saying; and if in the process of cashing out this formalism-we-don’t-understand, all we end up with are other, even more convoluted formalisms-we-don’t-understand, then we will have made no progress. This is not to say that the quantum world is obliged to match our intuitions. It is only to say that for an interpretation to even qualify as an interpretation, it will have to give some content to its formalism. As content goes, ‘world-splitting’ and ‘Magical Reality Fluid’ is not much of an improvement, if improvement it is, over ‘particle’ and ‘wave.’
As for myself, I currently assign about a .2 to Bohm, a .2 to all the possibly unformulated hidden variables theories (if they exist), and a .6 to multiverse-type theories, dominated by the many views that no one’s come up with yet. (The probability for collapse-type theories is too small to matter here.) But I think most physicists who have a view on the issue assign a greater-than-.9 probability to their preferred variants of MW; and I haven’t seen evidence that they’ve grappled with the foundational questions enough to warrant that much confidence. A difference of .3 is very large when the entire universe is at stake; even if I would ultimately bet slightly against Bohm, considering the level of disregard for his model, some of the most useful work will be in feigning multiverse hyperskepticism, and in particular in challenging MW to become more rigorous and explicit in what it means with all this world-talk. Bohm may sound unfashionably 19th-century at times, but at least it never sounds mystical.
Sure, but the theory with the simplest sound-bite axiomatization may not be the most parsimonious theory at the end of the day. And your confidence in that starting point will depend heavily on how confident you are in the prospects for extracting the Born probabilities from the Schrödinger equation on its lonesome. A theist will claim that his starting point is maximally simple relative to its explanatory power—heck, one of his axioms is that his starting point is maximally simple! that’s how simplicity works, right? -- but the difficulty of actually extracting normality from theism without recourse to ‘deep mysteries’ undermines the project in spite of its promising convergences with the data.
I meant not simplest as in simplest sound bite, I meant in the way mr. Yudkowsky has painfully explained elsewhere when he treated Occam’s Razor. One single equation is always a simpler proposition than two; and a whole intelligent being that sparked Existence itself and is not made of parts is so far off the map it’s not even worth considering as a preliminary hypothesis.
The wave occurs at both positions (or with both spin components); the particle does not. Being made of particles, I have a determinate brain-state, not a superposed one; and I observe a determinate particle position, though the dynaymics of that particle (and of my brain-state) are guided by the wave function. Many Worlds seems to predict that I will both see a spin-up measurement result and a spin-down measurement result, when I observe the superposed state. But in fact I seem to either see spin-up or spin-down, not both. So at this simple stage, Bohm correctly predicts our observation, and Many Worlds does not. That’s why the challenge for Many Worlds is to make sense of the probabilistic element of QM. The Schrödinger dynamics leave no room for probability; they are, as you note, deterministic.
If you have any system that is in a given state A and that system interacts with another one that is in a superposition of states X and Y, it no longer makes sense to talk about the first and second system: the whole system is now in a superposition of states. Same thing with observing the measurement: what you actually observe is a computer telling you “spin-up” or “spin-down”. So that’s a gazillion atoms and molecules and particles and whatnot that’s different depending simply on the state of the electron. Now suppose you somehow isolated that computer completely from the outside, so that not a single photon left it, then you could say that the computer is in a superposition. And as soon as you looked, so would you. The fact that you don’t actually see the computer accusing both “spin-up” and “spin-down” or some combination is just a consequence of the fact that, while the whole system, including you, your brain, the computer, the room you’re in, the air you’re breathing, etc., is in a superposition, the amplitude for the two states to interact is infinitesimal. For all intents and purposes, these two states have decohered. That’s not to say superposition is gone; it’s just to say that the amplitude for those two states to interact is nearly zero.
A multiverser may respond: ‘But we’ve come so far! We’ve made such progress! Surely we deserve to be treated as the standard view by this point. All that’s left is the small problem of explaining the emergence of the real.’
Eh… I don’t know about that. I mean… well, I’ll come to that in a bit.
This is not to say that the quantum world is obliged to match our intuitions. It is only to say that for an interpretation to even qualify as an interpretation, it will have to give some content to its formalism. As content goes, ‘world-splitting’ and ‘Magical Reality Fluid’ is not much of an improvement, if improvement it is, over ‘particle’ and ‘wave.’
I’ll comment on it in a bit, too.
But I think most physicists who have a view on the issue assign a greater-than-.9 probability to their preferred variants of MW; and I haven’t seen evidence that they’ve grappled with the foundational questions enough to warrant that much confidence.
I think that is the same problem I had with any other theories. The very idea of non-locality triggers alarm bells all over my brain. That > .9 probability to MW, I believe, stems, at least partially, from an implicit < .01 probability to non-locality. So that really leaves very little room for other interpretations, and those, from what I’ve read, sound more bogus than Bohm.
[...] and in particular in challenging MW to become more rigorous and explicit in what it means with all this world-talk. Bohm may sound unfashionably 19th-century at times, but at least it never sounds mystical.
I, personally, don’t think MW sounds all that “mystical.” I guess that comes from having lived half my life in the 21st century, so even in fiction the notion of multiple universes has never been a scary, strange one. The existence of a multiverse has always been a… persistent idea in my mind, and once I started reading up on Q.M. and studying the subject I just gave form to that intuition. That being said, I do agree with you that, at least from Wikipedia’s list of interpretations, Bohm’s does look like the most solid alternative to MW.
And coming to my final point… the Born probabilities. I honestly, truly have not a clue where they come from. I am hoping that any final unified theory might be able to solve that little problem (HA, little, right), but it wouldn’t be bad if someone solved it from within Q.M. itself. Some have tried, and I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I believe I am ready to read their attempts and truly grok what they mean so I can myself judge my probability estimates.
I meant not simplest as in simplest sound bite, I meant in the way mr. Yudkowsky has painfully explained elsewhere when he treated Occam’s Razor. One single equation is always a simpler proposition than two; and a whole intelligent being that sparked Existence itself and is not made of parts is so far off the map it’s not even worth considering as a preliminary hypothesis.
Yes, I grok. My point was that some theists don’t just think that God is simple partwise; they think that in some unknown (perhaps ineffable) way he’s maximally conceptually simple, i.e., if we were smarter we could formulate God in something equation-like and suddenly understand why everything about him really flows forth elegantly from a profoundly simple and unitary property. (And if everything else flows forth inevitably from God, the theory as a whole is no more complex than its God-term. Of course, free-will-invoking variants will be explanatorily inelegant by design; sudden inexplicable ‘choices’ will function for libertarians like collapse functions for Copenhagenists.)
Obviously, this promise of being able to formulate God in conceptually (and not just mereologically) simple terms is not credible. But this was the point of my (admittedly unkind) analogy; we should be wary of theories that promise an elegant, unimpeachably Simple reduction but have difficulty connecting that reduction to normality even in a sweeping, generic fashion. MW is obviously much better in this regard than theism, but one of the problems with theism (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the ‘simple’ undemonstrated) is interestingly analogous to the problem with MW (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the ‘reduction’ undemonstrated). I don’t take this to be a distinct argument against MW; I just wanted to call it to attention.
I think that is the same problem I had with any other theories. The very idea of non-locality triggers alarm bells all over my brain. That > .9 probability to MW, I believe, stems, at least partially, from an implicit < .01 probability to non-locality.
Fair enough. This perhaps is the fundamental question: The naive interpretation of data from EPR-style experiments is quite simply that nonlocal causation (albeit not of the sort that can be used to transmit information) is in effect between distant entangled states. If your commitment to locality is strong enough, then you can recover locality by positing that you’ve imperceptibly fallen into another world in interacting with one of the particles, dragging everything around you into a somehow-distinct component of a larger, quasi-dialetheist (really, complex) reality. I don’t begrudge those who pursue this path; I only encourage careful scrutiny of exactly which priors we’re appealing to in taking that first step away from the naive, superficial interpretation of the experimental result that caused this aspect of the problem.
I, personally, don’t think MW sounds all that “mystical.” I guess that comes from having lived half my life in the 21st century, so even in fiction the notion of multiple universes has never been a scary, strange one.
I don’t find the idea of clearly distinct universes mystical or strange or scary. I do find it strange and very-nearly-incoherent to think of worlds ‘bleeding together’ at the edges; and I very much wonder what it would be like to fully inhabit that intersection between worlds.
the Born probabilities. I honestly, truly have not a clue where they come from.
Note that on BM, the Born probabilities emerge from stochastic initial particle distributions; probabilities are epistemic, not metaphysical (as they are in collapse). One can raise the further question ‘Why would a random distribution of particles yield the Born statistics as opposed to some other option?’ Durr, Goldstein, and Zanghi account for this distribution in Quantum Equilibrium and the Origin of Absolute Uncertainty. This specific point is a strong reason to take Bohmian Mechanics seriously.
BM requires some really unpleasant initial commitments, but there don’t seem to be any special interpretive problems, paradoxes, or unsolved problems in BM, aside from the ‘ordinary’ legwork required in any general microphysical theory (e.g., we need a Bohmian QFT). BM has solved the Measurement Problem; MW merely has some really suggestive hints that it might someday offer a more elegant solution of its own.
The sole difficulty BM faces, in contrast, is that it’s just kind of… ugly. Overtly, avowedly, unabashedly ugly. (That’s really what I respect most about the theory. It doesn’t hide its flaws; it defines itself in terms of them.) But until these same problems have been solved in at least one of BM’s competitors, we have no way of knowing that some analogous ugliness (like ‘magical reality fluid’) won’t be demanded in the end in any empirically adequate interpretation! Scary thought, eh? I also take seriously the pedagogical utility of BM (in spite of its inelegance in practice), as expressed in the above paper: “Perhaps this paper should be read in the following spirit: In order to grasp the essence of Quantum Theory, one must first completely understand at least one quantum theory.” Even if BM is false, using it as a naively concrete reading of the QM formalism may help us better grasp the general structural features that any empirically adequate QM interpretation will need to preserve.
MW is obviously much better in this regard than theism, but one of the problems with theism (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the ‘simple’ undemonstrated) is interestingly analogous to the problem with MW (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the ‘reduction’ undemonstrated). I don’t take this to be a distinct argument against MW; I just wanted to call it to attention.
I guess we’ll have to wait until we have interstellar travels to observe completely superposed civilisations so that we can actually see MW? That was a joke, by the way.
If your commitment to locality is strong enough, then you can recover locality by positing that you’ve imperceptibly fallen into another world in interacting with one of the particles, dragging everything around you into a somehow-distinct component of a larger, quasi-dialetheist (really, complex) reality. I don’t begrudge those who pursue this path; I only encourage careful scrutiny of exactly which priors we’re appealing to in taking that first step away from the naive, superficial interpretation of the experimental result that caused this aspect of the problem.
It’s not really “fallen into another world” as much as “being in a superposed state.” If you assume that superposition is a real effect of wavefunctions (particles), then you have to assume that you also belong in states. The only way of escaping that is not believing superposition is an actual, real effect, which to me looks like exactly what Bohm says.
Now I’m not saying that I give a > .9 probability to MW. It’s > .5, but I do not trust my own ability to gauge my probability estimates the way you did.
I don’t find the idea of clearly distinct universes mystical or strange or scary. I do find it strange and very-nearly-incoherent to think of worlds ‘bleeding together’ at the edges; and I very much wonder what it would be like to fully inhabit that intersection between worlds.
Point. I think mr. Yudkowsky mentioned something about a non-existence of worlds at that intersection? As in, the leakage from the “larger” worlds is so big that the intersection ceases existing, and then you have clearly distinct universes. Or at least that’s what I understood. I don’t think I like or even agree with the idea; it, too, sounds to me like trying to fit physics into intuition. But anyway, I agree with you that one of the main points in my head against MW is that intersection. That, and what I mentioned above, of completely impossible situations (like zombie Kennedy) never having happened in recorded history.
BM requires some really unpleasant initial commitments, but there don’t seem to be any special interpretive problems, paradoxes, or unsolved problems in BM, aside from the ‘ordinary’ legwork required in any general microphysical theory (e.g., we need a Bohmian QFT). BM has solved the Measurement Problem; MW merely has some really suggestive hints that it might someday offer a more elegant solution of its own.
Point. Which is why I agree with you that BM is the only other serious candidate. [whine]But those initial commitments are really unpleasant.[/whine]
The sole difficulty BM faces, in contrast, is that it’s just kind of… ugly. Overtly, avowedly, unabashedly ugly. (That’s really what I respect most about the theory. It doesn’t hide its flaws; it defines itself in terms of them.) But until these same problems have been solved in at least one of BM’s competitors, we have no way of knowing that some analogous ugliness (like ‘magical reality fluid’) won’t be demanded in the end in any empirically adequate interpretation! Scary thought, eh?
Scary indeed. Magical reality fluid actually terrifies me, and if it turns out that MW requires it… well, I think I prefer non-locality to that.
They aren’t intuitive molds, in the system-1 sense; ‘particle’ and ‘wave’ are theoretical constructs
I think that is pretty much the wrong way round. The only way you can model a dimensionless particle in QM
is as a diract delta function, but they are mathematically intractible (with a parallel argument applying to pure waves), so in a sens there are no particles or waves in QM, and whatever w/p dualism is, it is not a dualism of sharply defined opposites, as would be implied by Bohr’s yin-yang symbol!
. But in fact I seem to either see spin-up or spin-down, not both.
In fact, you see macroscopic pointer readings. That is an important point, since Many Worlders think that the superposition disappers with macroscopic decoehrence.
The only way you can model a dimensionless particle in QM is as a [dirac] delta function
I wasn’t specifically assuming dimensionless particles. Classical atoms could be modeled particulately without being points, provided each can be picked out by a fixed position and a momentum.
In fact, you see macroscopic pointer readings. That is an important point, since Many Worlders think that the superposition disappers with macroscopic [decoherence].
Yes, this distinction is very important for BM too. For example, BM actually fails the empirical adequacy test if you treat ‘spin-up’ and ‘spin-down’ as measurable properties of particles.
Actually, I’m somewhat grateful that it was ignored (except by de Broglie), since its intuitiveness might otherwise have become such a firm orthodoxy that we wouldn’t have the rich debate between MW theorists of today.
For instance, David Deutsch’s contribution that BM is just MW with unecesary additional complexity.
Also, BM-style views predate Everett by decades, so one can’t make the case that BM is an ad-hoc distortion of MW.
Although one can still make the case that MW is BM Done Right. :-).a
If one wishes. But MW and BM give contrary answers to almost every question, in spite of their mutual empirical adequacy. They’re sufficiently distinct as to almost qualify as alien physics—incommensurate-yet-coherent in the way you might expect the theories of two independent civilizations to be. That in itself makes the act of trying to evaluate and compare the two kinds of model Bayesianly extremely useful and informative. It really gets to the heart of making some of our core priors explicit.
Or indeed see the SEP on Modal Interpretations since it is arguable that Bohmian mechanics is a special case:
Bub suggests that a number of traditional interpretations of quantum theory can be characterized as modal interpretations if the existence of a preferred observable is allowed. Notable among them are the Dirac-von Neumann interpretation, (what Bub takes to be) Bohr’s interpretation, and Bohm’s theory. In the last case, Bub argues that Bohm’s theory can be recovered as a modal interpretation in which the R is the position observable.
There is an interesting further question about whether the modal concept of “possibility” can be further reduced… I guess Eliezer would argue that it should be.
I have had this question in my mind for ages. You say that these counterfactual universes don’t actually exist. But, according to Many-Worlds, don’t all lawful Universes actually really really exist? I mean, isn’t there some amplitude for Mr. Oswald to not have shot Kennedy, and then you get a blob where Kennedy didn’t get murdered?
I’ve been banging my head against a wall on this and still can’t come to a conclusion. Are the decoherent blobs actually capable of creating multiple histories on the observable level, up here? It looks, to me, that they should be. I mean, if these particles have each an amplitude to “be” here and there, then there is some amplitude for the combination of all particles in the Universe to correspond to a completely different macro Universe.
On the other hand, that seems to also imply that there’s some amplitude for things like President Kennedy being shot, and then suddenly his wounds closed and he was up and running again. And that doesn’t sound okay at all.
So… I am very, very confused.
Nitpick: All the Many-Worlds of QM still follow our particular set of physics. For “all lawful universes” to really really exist, you probably have to go to Tegmark IV or something like that....
Yes, I’m sorry, by “lawful” I’d meant exactly that, universes that obey our particular set of physics.
Abstractions like probability and number are constructed by us; they don’t strictly exist, but it’s useful to act as though they do, since they help organize our reasoning. It could be that by coincidence that some part of the Real World corresponds precisely to the structure of our modal or mathematical reasoning; for instance, the many-worlds interpretation of QM could be true, or we could live in a Tegmark ensemble. But this would still just be an interesting coincidence. It wouldn’t change the fact that our abstractions are our own; and if we discovered tomorrow that a Bohmian interpretation of QM is correct, rather than an Everettian one, it would have no foundational implications for such a high-level, anthropocentric phenomena as probability theory.
Thinking in this way is useful for two reasons. First, it insulates our logical fictions from metaphysical skepticism; our uncertainty as to the existence of a Platonic realm of Number need not undermine our confidence that 2 and 2 make 4. Second, it keeps us from being tempted to slide down the slippery slope to treating all our fictions (like currency, and intentionality, and qualia, and Sherlock Holmes) as equally metaphysically committing.
Well, whether probability and number exist or not is moot. The point of fact is that when you look at any quantum system there is a probability of finding it in any given (continuous set of) state(s) equals the squared modulus of the amplitude for it to be in such state. As mr. Yudkowsky once put, and I paraphrase, “I still want to know the nonexistent laws that coordinate my meaningless Universe”.
And my point is: assuming Quantum Physics is completely correct, without us adding the additional postulates, do all combinations of universes exist, superposed to each other? That is to say: is the quantum suicide limited to 50⁄50 strictly quantised experiments, or does our consciousness live on in a forever branching multiverse? Sort of.
Maybe the way out is that counterfactuals don’t exist in their home universes.
I just read Mr. Yudkowsky’s articles on Boltzmann Brains and the Anthropic trilemma… and I had thought of those questions a while ago. While they’re not directly related to this comment, I guess I should comment about them here, too.
I have no problem thinking of myself as a Boltzmann Brain. Since most (if not all) such Brains will die an instant after existing, I guess my existence could be accurately described as a string of Boltzmann Brains in different regions of spacetime, each containing a small (not sure how small) slice of my existence. Perhaps they all exist at the same time. And the Anthropic Principle would explain the illusion of continuity, somewhat. My main thoughts on the Boltzmann Brain idea is that any hypothesis that has no way to be tested even in principle is equivalent to the Null hypothesis. I guess what I mean is, if I found out right now, with P ~ 1, that my existence is a string of Boltzmann Brains, that would not affect my predictions. I’m not sure I should be thinking this… because this whole matter confuses the hell out of me, but that’s my current mental state.
As for the Anthropic Trilemma… well, I guess it pretty much means mr. Yudkowsky has the same doubts as I do. Very, very confusing business indeed. Sometimes I think I should just quit thinking and become a stripper. That was a joke, by the way.
I had the same reaction… Can this be the same Eliezer who authored the sequences, and gave such strong support for the reality of Many Worlds?
I was half-expecting the other shoe to drop somewhere in the article… namely that if you are prepared to accept that the Many Worlds really exist, it makes the Great Reductionist Project a whole lot easier. Statements about causality reduce to statements about causal graphs, which in turn reduce to statements about counterfactuals, which in turn reduce to statements of actual fact about different blobs of the (real) quantum state vector. Similarly, statements about physical “possibility” and “probability” reduce to complicated statements about other blobs and their sizes as measured by the inner product on the state space.
Maybe Eliezer will be leading that way later… If he isn’t I share your confusion.
It was mentioned that if you were to make a continuous analog of the Bayesian Network, you’d end up with space and time, or some such. Maybe if you have a probabilistic Bayesian Network you get QM out of it? As in, any given parent node has a number of child nodes, each happening with a certain probability… and then if you make the continuous analog of such you’ll get Quantum Mechanics and Many-Worlds.
Mr. Yudkowsky has thoroughly convinced me of the reality of Many-Worlds (and my ongoing study of Q.M. has not yet even suggested otherwise), so… so what, then?
See SEP on Bohmian Mechanics for the main rival view.
I have read about Bohmian Mechanics before, and it failed to convince me. This article keeps talking about ‘non-determinism’ inherent to Q.M. but I’m pretty sure Relative State is quite very deterministic. Also, adding the specification of a particle’s position to a description doesn’t sound at all to me like the simplest explanation possible.
Maybe this is just me saying I prefer locality to counterfactual definiteness, but… Relative State still wins my favour.
Read: traditional Q.M. Arguments for BM and for MW are both largely still responding to Copenhagenism’s legacy of collapse theorists. The next stage in the dialectic should be for them to set aside the easy target of collapse and start going for each others’ throats directly.
Does adding Magical Reality Fluid and an infinity of invisible Worlds sound simple, at the outset? MW seems simple and elegant because it’s familiar; this tempts us to forget just how much remains unresolved by the theory, and just how much it demands that we posit beyond the experimental observations. Let’s be careful not to let unfamiliarity tempt us into treating BM in an asymmetric way. Bell’s way of framing BM is very intuitive, I think:
“Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.”
Actually, I’m somewhat grateful that it was ignored (except by de Broglie), since its intuitiveness might otherwise have become such a firm orthodoxy that we wouldn’t have the rich debate between MW theorists of today. Given our human tendency to fix on our first solution, it is very useful that the weakest theory (collapse) is the one people started with.
“Prefer” as in it sounds more elegant, or as in it seems more likely to be true? Untangling those two is the real problem. We also need to keep in mind that the MW style of locality is a rather strange one. (Consider MW theories on which worlds ‘split;’ does this conservation-of-energy-violating split propagate outward at the speed of light? What basis does it occur in?)
Bayesian reasoning isn’t bivalent; our goal is not simply to pick the Best Option, but to try to roughly estimate how uncertain we should be. For instance, at this point should we assign a .4 probability to BM? .1? .005?
I’m not convinced of BM either, but I take it seriously as the main rival to the entire MW family of interpretations. I take Collapse interpretations far less seriously, not just because of their strange dualism but because they have more promise of being empirically verified (hence their lack of verification counts against them), whereas BM and MW don’t seem to be distinguishable. (Also, BM-style views predate Everett by decades, so one can’t make the case that BM is an ad-hoc distortion of MW.)
That’s not at all what Relative State states… it just states that the Schrödinger Equation is all there is, full stop. The existence of a number of worlds is a consequence, not an assumption.
Please forgive me if I misunderstand, but that sounds, to me, just a way of making wavefunctions fit into the intuitive “particle” and “wave” molds. And it also looks like it ignores the fact that people are made of particles (wavefunctions), so whatever effects of any given particle (wavefunction) are detected by us would cause us to be superposed. I don’t… really see a way out of being superposed at macroscopic level.
“Prefer” as in both sounds more elegant and seems, to me, more likely to be true. Also, the conservation of energy is never violated, I don’t think, since we already had to multiply the total energy by the normalised amplitude squared of the different states anyway.
I’m sorry, you’re right. What I meant by “failed to convince me” and “wins my favour” is that I still assign a > .5 probability to MW, or any interpretation that doesn’t try to sneak away from macroscopic superposition, or tries to tell me physics is non-local. As I said, I have done my share of research on alternative interpretations of Q.M. after I started studying it (I’m not nearly done studying it, though) before, and the one that sounded to me the simplest was MW.
I guess I don’t take it seriously because, to my untrained eyes, it looks like a theory that’s trying to escape quantum effects affecting the macroscopic world by sticking macroscopic intuitions into the quantum world.
Sure, but the theory with the simplest sound-bite axiomatization may not be the most parsimonious theory at the end of the day. And your confidence in that starting point will depend heavily on how confident you are in the prospects for extracting the Born probabilities from the Schrödinger equation on its lonesome. A theist will claim that his starting point is maximally simple relative to its explanatory power—heck, one of his axioms is that his starting point is maximally simple! that’s how simplicity works, right? -- but the difficulty of actually extracting normality from theism without recourse to ‘deep mysteries’ undermines the project in spite of its promising convergences with the data.
They aren’t intuitive molds, in the system-1 sense; ‘particle’ and ‘wave’ are theoretical constructs, and we understand them via (and import them from) structurally similar macro-phenomena. ‘Wave’ and ‘particle’ are sufficiently simple ideas, as macro-phenomena go, that they may recur at multiple levels of organization. I don’t assume that they must do so; but it’s at least an idea worth assessing, if the resultant theory recaptures the whole of normality without paradox or mystery.
The wave occurs at both positions (or with both spin components); the particle does not. Being made of particles, I have a determinate brain-state, not a superposed one; and I observe a determinate particle position, though the dynaymics of that particle (and of my brain-state) are guided by the wave function. Many Worlds seems to predict that I will both see a spin-up measurement result and a spin-down measurement result, when I observe the superposed state. But in fact I seem to either see spin-up or spin-down, not both. So at this simple stage, Bohm correctly predicts our observation, and Many Worlds does not. That’s why the challenge for Many Worlds is to make sense of the probabilistic element of QM. The Schrödinger dynamics leave no room for probability; they are, as you note, deterministic.
A multiverser may respond: ‘But we’ve come so far! We’ve made such progress! Surely we deserve to be treated as the standard view by this point. All that’s left is the small problem of explaining the emergence of the real.’ The Copenhagenist and Bohmian hear this, and they think: But accounting for our actual observations is the whole game. If you’ve succeeded in every task except actually predicting the Born probabilities, then what have you in fact gained, aside from a string-theory-style edifice of elegant abstraction? There’s the rub.
I understand your impulse, but it’s not as though we have a cache of ‘non-macroscopic intuitions’ to employ in lieu of our macroscopic ones. What we have are some elegant formalisms, which relate to our observations in puzzlingly regular-but-nonlinear ways (the Born probabilities, the Projection Postulate). We then try to figure out what our elegant formalism is saying; and if in the process of cashing out this formalism-we-don’t-understand, all we end up with are other, even more convoluted formalisms-we-don’t-understand, then we will have made no progress. This is not to say that the quantum world is obliged to match our intuitions. It is only to say that for an interpretation to even qualify as an interpretation, it will have to give some content to its formalism. As content goes, ‘world-splitting’ and ‘Magical Reality Fluid’ is not much of an improvement, if improvement it is, over ‘particle’ and ‘wave.’
As for myself, I currently assign about a .2 to Bohm, a .2 to all the possibly unformulated hidden variables theories (if they exist), and a .6 to multiverse-type theories, dominated by the many views that no one’s come up with yet. (The probability for collapse-type theories is too small to matter here.) But I think most physicists who have a view on the issue assign a greater-than-.9 probability to their preferred variants of MW; and I haven’t seen evidence that they’ve grappled with the foundational questions enough to warrant that much confidence. A difference of .3 is very large when the entire universe is at stake; even if I would ultimately bet slightly against Bohm, considering the level of disregard for his model, some of the most useful work will be in feigning multiverse hyperskepticism, and in particular in challenging MW to become more rigorous and explicit in what it means with all this world-talk. Bohm may sound unfashionably 19th-century at times, but at least it never sounds mystical.
I meant not simplest as in simplest sound bite, I meant in the way mr. Yudkowsky has painfully explained elsewhere when he treated Occam’s Razor. One single equation is always a simpler proposition than two; and a whole intelligent being that sparked Existence itself and is not made of parts is so far off the map it’s not even worth considering as a preliminary hypothesis.
If you have any system that is in a given state A and that system interacts with another one that is in a superposition of states X and Y, it no longer makes sense to talk about the first and second system: the whole system is now in a superposition of states. Same thing with observing the measurement: what you actually observe is a computer telling you “spin-up” or “spin-down”. So that’s a gazillion atoms and molecules and particles and whatnot that’s different depending simply on the state of the electron. Now suppose you somehow isolated that computer completely from the outside, so that not a single photon left it, then you could say that the computer is in a superposition. And as soon as you looked, so would you. The fact that you don’t actually see the computer accusing both “spin-up” and “spin-down” or some combination is just a consequence of the fact that, while the whole system, including you, your brain, the computer, the room you’re in, the air you’re breathing, etc., is in a superposition, the amplitude for the two states to interact is infinitesimal. For all intents and purposes, these two states have decohered. That’s not to say superposition is gone; it’s just to say that the amplitude for those two states to interact is nearly zero.
Eh… I don’t know about that. I mean… well, I’ll come to that in a bit.
I’ll comment on it in a bit, too.
I think that is the same problem I had with any other theories. The very idea of non-locality triggers alarm bells all over my brain. That > .9 probability to MW, I believe, stems, at least partially, from an implicit < .01 probability to non-locality. So that really leaves very little room for other interpretations, and those, from what I’ve read, sound more bogus than Bohm.
I, personally, don’t think MW sounds all that “mystical.” I guess that comes from having lived half my life in the 21st century, so even in fiction the notion of multiple universes has never been a scary, strange one. The existence of a multiverse has always been a… persistent idea in my mind, and once I started reading up on Q.M. and studying the subject I just gave form to that intuition. That being said, I do agree with you that, at least from Wikipedia’s list of interpretations, Bohm’s does look like the most solid alternative to MW.
And coming to my final point… the Born probabilities. I honestly, truly have not a clue where they come from. I am hoping that any final unified theory might be able to solve that little problem (HA, little, right), but it wouldn’t be bad if someone solved it from within Q.M. itself. Some have tried, and I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I believe I am ready to read their attempts and truly grok what they mean so I can myself judge my probability estimates.
Yes, I grok. My point was that some theists don’t just think that God is simple partwise; they think that in some unknown (perhaps ineffable) way he’s maximally conceptually simple, i.e., if we were smarter we could formulate God in something equation-like and suddenly understand why everything about him really flows forth elegantly from a profoundly simple and unitary property. (And if everything else flows forth inevitably from God, the theory as a whole is no more complex than its God-term. Of course, free-will-invoking variants will be explanatorily inelegant by design; sudden inexplicable ‘choices’ will function for libertarians like collapse functions for Copenhagenists.)
Obviously, this promise of being able to formulate God in conceptually (and not just mereologically) simple terms is not credible. But this was the point of my (admittedly unkind) analogy; we should be wary of theories that promise an elegant, unimpeachably Simple reduction but have difficulty connecting that reduction to normality even in a sweeping, generic fashion. MW is obviously much better in this regard than theism, but one of the problems with theism (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the ‘simple’ undemonstrated) is interestingly analogous to the problem with MW (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the ‘reduction’ undemonstrated). I don’t take this to be a distinct argument against MW; I just wanted to call it to attention.
Fair enough. This perhaps is the fundamental question: The naive interpretation of data from EPR-style experiments is quite simply that nonlocal causation (albeit not of the sort that can be used to transmit information) is in effect between distant entangled states. If your commitment to locality is strong enough, then you can recover locality by positing that you’ve imperceptibly fallen into another world in interacting with one of the particles, dragging everything around you into a somehow-distinct component of a larger, quasi-dialetheist (really, complex) reality. I don’t begrudge those who pursue this path; I only encourage careful scrutiny of exactly which priors we’re appealing to in taking that first step away from the naive, superficial interpretation of the experimental result that caused this aspect of the problem.
I don’t find the idea of clearly distinct universes mystical or strange or scary. I do find it strange and very-nearly-incoherent to think of worlds ‘bleeding together’ at the edges; and I very much wonder what it would be like to fully inhabit that intersection between worlds.
Note that on BM, the Born probabilities emerge from stochastic initial particle distributions; probabilities are epistemic, not metaphysical (as they are in collapse). One can raise the further question ‘Why would a random distribution of particles yield the Born statistics as opposed to some other option?’ Durr, Goldstein, and Zanghi account for this distribution in Quantum Equilibrium and the Origin of Absolute Uncertainty. This specific point is a strong reason to take Bohmian Mechanics seriously.
BM requires some really unpleasant initial commitments, but there don’t seem to be any special interpretive problems, paradoxes, or unsolved problems in BM, aside from the ‘ordinary’ legwork required in any general microphysical theory (e.g., we need a Bohmian QFT). BM has solved the Measurement Problem; MW merely has some really suggestive hints that it might someday offer a more elegant solution of its own.
The sole difficulty BM faces, in contrast, is that it’s just kind of… ugly. Overtly, avowedly, unabashedly ugly. (That’s really what I respect most about the theory. It doesn’t hide its flaws; it defines itself in terms of them.) But until these same problems have been solved in at least one of BM’s competitors, we have no way of knowing that some analogous ugliness (like ‘magical reality fluid’) won’t be demanded in the end in any empirically adequate interpretation! Scary thought, eh? I also take seriously the pedagogical utility of BM (in spite of its inelegance in practice), as expressed in the above paper: “Perhaps this paper should be read in the following spirit: In order to grasp the essence of Quantum Theory, one must first completely understand at least one quantum theory.” Even if BM is false, using it as a naively concrete reading of the QM formalism may help us better grasp the general structural features that any empirically adequate QM interpretation will need to preserve.
I guess we’ll have to wait until we have interstellar travels to observe completely superposed civilisations so that we can actually see MW? That was a joke, by the way.
It’s not really “fallen into another world” as much as “being in a superposed state.” If you assume that superposition is a real effect of wavefunctions (particles), then you have to assume that you also belong in states. The only way of escaping that is not believing superposition is an actual, real effect, which to me looks like exactly what Bohm says. Now I’m not saying that I give a > .9 probability to MW. It’s > .5, but I do not trust my own ability to gauge my probability estimates the way you did.
Point. I think mr. Yudkowsky mentioned something about a non-existence of worlds at that intersection? As in, the leakage from the “larger” worlds is so big that the intersection ceases existing, and then you have clearly distinct universes. Or at least that’s what I understood. I don’t think I like or even agree with the idea; it, too, sounds to me like trying to fit physics into intuition. But anyway, I agree with you that one of the main points in my head against MW is that intersection. That, and what I mentioned above, of completely impossible situations (like zombie Kennedy) never having happened in recorded history.
Point. Which is why I agree with you that BM is the only other serious candidate. [whine]But those initial commitments are really unpleasant.[/whine]
Scary indeed. Magical reality fluid actually terrifies me, and if it turns out that MW requires it… well, I think I prefer non-locality to that.
I think that is pretty much the wrong way round. The only way you can model a dimensionless particle in QM is as a diract delta function, but they are mathematically intractible (with a parallel argument applying to pure waves), so in a sens there are no particles or waves in QM, and whatever w/p dualism is, it is not a dualism of sharply defined opposites, as would be implied by Bohr’s yin-yang symbol!
In fact, you see macroscopic pointer readings. That is an important point, since Many Worlders think that the superposition disappers with macroscopic decoehrence.
I wasn’t specifically assuming dimensionless particles. Classical atoms could be modeled particulately without being points, provided each can be picked out by a fixed position and a momentum.
Yes, this distinction is very important for BM too. For example, BM actually fails the empirical adequacy test if you treat ‘spin-up’ and ‘spin-down’ as measurable properties of particles.
For instance, David Deutsch’s contribution that BM is just MW with unecesary additional complexity.
Although one can still make the case that MW is BM Done Right. :-).a
If one wishes. But MW and BM give contrary answers to almost every question, in spite of their mutual empirical adequacy. They’re sufficiently distinct as to almost qualify as alien physics—incommensurate-yet-coherent in the way you might expect the theories of two independent civilizations to be. That in itself makes the act of trying to evaluate and compare the two kinds of model Bayesianly extremely useful and informative. It really gets to the heart of making some of our core priors explicit.
You could say, for instance, that BM is nonlocal, and MW local, but that is hardly in favour of BM.
Or rather see relational QM, otherwise known as MWI Done Right.
Now I want to read “If rQM had come first...”
(Implied: I agree with you on this.)
RQM is MWI, so the story would be the same, maybe with less pathos.
Hasn’t (some version of) that been ruled out by Bell test experiments?
No. Bell’s theorem rules out local hidden-variable models.
Or indeed see the SEP on Modal Interpretations since it is arguable that Bohmian mechanics is a special case:
There is an interesting further question about whether the modal concept of “possibility” can be further reduced… I guess Eliezer would argue that it should be.