My problem with the collapse version of QM—and this may stem from the fact that Eliezer’s explanation is the only one I’ve read that I’ve actually had a decent understanding of it (such that I am relatively confident I could pass along the basic concepts to someone else without becoming “Goofus” in some of EY’s earlier examples) - is that there is no apparent reason for the collapse.
Take a coin toss. We say the probability of a heads or tails on a fair coin is .5 for each outcome. When heads eventually happens, the truth of the matter is that if we had information like the state of the coin pre-flip, the position of the hand flipping the coin, the force of the arm as it moves up and the exact position and force of the thumb on the coin itself, we could raise our estimation of the probability for that flip to be heads up to probably .9+. Given more precise information, we could conceivably get the probability up to .99. Excluding quantum effects, the actual probability that the coin would come up heads in that particular instance was essentially 1.
This does not seem to be the case with quantum mechanics. There does not seem to be any new information that could give any insight as to why the electron went through the first slit instead of the second, or vice versa. It’s not just that the information is hidden, it doesn’t seem to exist at all. Instead, the probability itself appears to be “baked into” reality, with no reason to prefer one outcome over the other. The CI response seems to be “It just does, Born probabilities blah blah blah accept it” without even attempting to explain what seems to me to be a major problem with the way reality works under this interpretation. CI doesn’t actually explain the Born probabilities any better than MWI, as far as I’ve read, they just seem to have “claimed” them. For this reason, I don’t think CI satisfies your criteria of having a “derivation… of the probabilities which contain all of the actual predictive content of quantum mechanics” criteria either. At least not any better than MWI.
If the wave functions aren’t a real property of the universe, then why the hell does reality seem to follow them? And if they are real, why did A happen when there is no reason B didn’t happen? This seems to imply that luck is a fundamental property of the universe!
It’s these two basic questions that I haven’t seen answered satisfactorily from the CI or more general collapse perspective (if such a thing exists separate from mainstream CI). The fact that most physicists believe some variation MWI bolsters my confidence, even though the idea that decoherance effectively produces zillions of universes continuously simply blows my mind.
My problem with the collapse version of QM—and this may stem from the fact that Eliezer’s explanation is the only one I’ve read that I’ve actually had a decent understanding of it (such that I am relatively confident I could pass along the basic concepts to someone else without becoming “Goofus” in some of EY’s earlier examples) - is that there is no apparent reason for the collapse.
Take a coin toss. We say the probability of a heads or tails on a fair coin is .5 for each outcome. When heads eventually happens, the truth of the matter is that if we had information like the state of the coin pre-flip, the position of the hand flipping the coin, the force of the arm as it moves up and the exact position and force of the thumb on the coin itself, we could raise our estimation of the probability for that flip to be heads up to probably .9+. Given more precise information, we could conceivably get the probability up to .99. Excluding quantum effects, the actual probability that the coin would come up heads in that particular instance was essentially 1.
This does not seem to be the case with quantum mechanics. There does not seem to be any new information that could give any insight as to why the electron went through the first slit instead of the second, or vice versa. It’s not just that the information is hidden, it doesn’t seem to exist at all. Instead, the probability itself appears to be “baked into” reality, with no reason to prefer one outcome over the other. The CI response seems to be “It just does, Born probabilities blah blah blah accept it” without even attempting to explain what seems to me to be a major problem with the way reality works under this interpretation. CI doesn’t actually explain the Born probabilities any better than MWI, as far as I’ve read, they just seem to have “claimed” them. For this reason, I don’t think CI satisfies your criteria of having a “derivation… of the probabilities which contain all of the actual predictive content of quantum mechanics” criteria either. At least not any better than MWI.
If the wave functions aren’t a real property of the universe, then why the hell does reality seem to follow them? And if they are real, why did A happen when there is no reason B didn’t happen? This seems to imply that luck is a fundamental property of the universe!
It’s these two basic questions that I haven’t seen answered satisfactorily from the CI or more general collapse perspective (if such a thing exists separate from mainstream CI). The fact that most physicists believe some variation MWI bolsters my confidence, even though the idea that decoherance effectively produces zillions of universes continuously simply blows my mind.