“The balance of arguments is overwhelmingly tipped; and physicists who deny it, are making specific errors of probability theory (which I have specifically laid out, and shown to you)”
I guess this refers to the error of supposing that Occam’s Razor literally means “have as few entities as possible”, rather than “have a theory as simple as possible”, and opposing Many Worlds for that reason. Which is indeed an error.
But perhaps for the last time, I will try to enumerate those problems with your position that I can remember.
There is no relativistic formulation of Many Worlds; you just trust that there is.
There is no derivation of the Born probabilities, which contain all the predictive content of quantum mechanics.
Robin Hanson has a proposal to derive the probabilities, but for now it rests on making vagueness about the concept of observers and worlds into a virtue.
You’ve given zero public consideration to other possibilities such as temporally bidirectional causation and nonsubjective collapse theories. You’ve also ignored Bohmian mechanics, a classically objective theory which does make all the predictions of quantum theory. You also haven’t said anything about the one version of Many Worlds which does produce predictions—the version Gell-Mann favors, “consistent histories”—which has a distinctly different flavor to the “waves in configuration space” version.
In view of all that, how can you possibly say that Many Worlds is rationally favored, or that you have made a compelling case for this?
“What you should say as a neo-rationalist is that … people should not be content with an incomplete description of the world, and that something like Minimum Description Length should be used to select between possible complete theories when there is nothing better, and you should leave it at that.”
I wrote a little essay at Nick Tarleton’s forum, here, about these problems. I will at some point link from there to my various comments posted here, so it’s all in the one place. And I suppose eventually I’ll have to write my own views out at length (not just my anti-MWI views). My main unexpressed view is that string theory is probably the answer, and that attempts to make ontological sense of physics will have to grapple with its details, and so all these other ‘interpretations’ are merely preliminary ideas that may at best be helpful in the real struggle.
“The balance of arguments is overwhelmingly tipped; and physicists who deny it, are making specific errors of probability theory (which I have specifically laid out, and shown to you)”
I guess this refers to the error of supposing that Occam’s Razor literally means “have as few entities as possible”, rather than “have a theory as simple as possible”, and opposing Many Worlds for that reason. Which is indeed an error.
But perhaps for the last time, I will try to enumerate those problems with your position that I can remember.
There is no relativistic formulation of Many Worlds; you just trust that there is.
There is no derivation of the Born probabilities, which contain all the predictive content of quantum mechanics.
Robin Hanson has a proposal to derive the probabilities, but for now it rests on making vagueness about the concept of observers and worlds into a virtue.
You’ve given zero public consideration to other possibilities such as temporally bidirectional causation and nonsubjective collapse theories. You’ve also ignored Bohmian mechanics, a classically objective theory which does make all the predictions of quantum theory. You also haven’t said anything about the one version of Many Worlds which does produce predictions—the version Gell-Mann favors, “consistent histories”—which has a distinctly different flavor to the “waves in configuration space” version.
In view of all that, how can you possibly say that Many Worlds is rationally favored, or that you have made a compelling case for this?
I’ll repeat my earlier recommendation:
“What you should say as a neo-rationalist is that … people should not be content with an incomplete description of the world, and that something like Minimum Description Length should be used to select between possible complete theories when there is nothing better, and you should leave it at that.”
I wrote a little essay at Nick Tarleton’s forum, here, about these problems. I will at some point link from there to my various comments posted here, so it’s all in the one place. And I suppose eventually I’ll have to write my own views out at length (not just my anti-MWI views). My main unexpressed view is that string theory is probably the answer, and that attempts to make ontological sense of physics will have to grapple with its details, and so all these other ‘interpretations’ are merely preliminary ideas that may at best be helpful in the real struggle.