Sorry to distract from your main point, but it is quite a distance from there to “therefore, there are Many Worlds”. And for that matter, you have definitely not addressed the notion of collapse in all its possible forms. The idea of universe-wide collapse caused by observation is definitely outlandish, solipsistic in fact, and also leaves “consciousness”, “observation”, or “measurement” as an unanalysed residue. However, that’s not the only way to introduce discontinuity into wavefunction evolution. One might have a jump (they won’t be collapses, if you think in terms of state vectors) merely with respect to a particular subspace. The actual history of states of the universe might be a complicated agglomeration of quantum states, with spacelike joins provided by the tensor product, and timelike joins by a semilocal unitary evolution.
Furthermore, there have always been people who held that the wavefunction is only a representation of one’s knowledge, and that collapse does not refer to an actual physical process. What you should say as a neo-rationalist is that those 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 suppose that the larger context is that in the case of seed AI, we need to get it right the first time, and therefore it would be helpful to have an example of rationality which doesn’t just consist of “run the experiment and see what happens”, in order to establish that it is possible to think about things in advance. But this is a bad example! Alas, I cannot call upon any intersubjective, third-party validation of this claim, but I do consider this (quantum ontology), if not my one true expertise, certainly a core specialization. And so I oppose my intuition to yours, and say that any valid completion of the Many Worlds idea is either going to have a simpler one-world variant, or, at best, it will be a theory of multiple self-contained worlds—not the splitting, half-merged, or otherwise interdependent worlds of standard MWI rhetoric. This is not a casual judgement; I could give a lengthy account of all the little reasons which lead up to it. If we had a showdown at the rationality dojo, I think it would come out the winner. But first of all, I think you should just ask yourself whether it makes sense to say “Many Worlds is the leading candidate” when all you have really shown is that a particular form of collapse theory is not.
But dammit, wavefunctions don’t collapse!
Sorry to distract from your main point, but it is quite a distance from there to “therefore, there are Many Worlds”. And for that matter, you have definitely not addressed the notion of collapse in all its possible forms. The idea of universe-wide collapse caused by observation is definitely outlandish, solipsistic in fact, and also leaves “consciousness”, “observation”, or “measurement” as an unanalysed residue. However, that’s not the only way to introduce discontinuity into wavefunction evolution. One might have a jump (they won’t be collapses, if you think in terms of state vectors) merely with respect to a particular subspace. The actual history of states of the universe might be a complicated agglomeration of quantum states, with spacelike joins provided by the tensor product, and timelike joins by a semilocal unitary evolution.
Furthermore, there have always been people who held that the wavefunction is only a representation of one’s knowledge, and that collapse does not refer to an actual physical process. What you should say as a neo-rationalist is that those 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 suppose that the larger context is that in the case of seed AI, we need to get it right the first time, and therefore it would be helpful to have an example of rationality which doesn’t just consist of “run the experiment and see what happens”, in order to establish that it is possible to think about things in advance. But this is a bad example! Alas, I cannot call upon any intersubjective, third-party validation of this claim, but I do consider this (quantum ontology), if not my one true expertise, certainly a core specialization. And so I oppose my intuition to yours, and say that any valid completion of the Many Worlds idea is either going to have a simpler one-world variant, or, at best, it will be a theory of multiple self-contained worlds—not the splitting, half-merged, or otherwise interdependent worlds of standard MWI rhetoric. This is not a casual judgement; I could give a lengthy account of all the little reasons which lead up to it. If we had a showdown at the rationality dojo, I think it would come out the winner. But first of all, I think you should just ask yourself whether it makes sense to say “Many Worlds is the leading candidate” when all you have really shown is that a particular form of collapse theory is not.