“The error” could mean: the false thing that is being asserted; the reason why it is false; or the cognitive mistake which allows it to escape detection.
Maybe I should begin with the true thing that is being asserted! Which is that the number of ink blots can depend on definition, or on the judgment or whim of the individual observer. That is indeed true.
It also may or may not be true that the number of branches, worlds, blobs, etc., in a wavefunction is similarly undefined, or dependent on a somewhat arbitrary definition.
What I deem to be categorically false is the proposition that this is also true of “observers”, or “portions of reality that can contain observers” (which might be called worlds or branches), or even just “portions of reality like the one that I find myself in” (which is a definition not involving observers, except incidentally).
The reason that this is false, is that the arbitrariness of the number of blobs, arises from the arbitrariness of their definition. Their very existence is in some sense arbitrary, relative, observer-dependent. It is because their existence is relative, that their number is relative.
The existence of the observed portion of reality is not “relative”; it is definitely there, and it is not caused by the contingent and changeable decisions of some observer about how to divide up reality. On the contrary, the observer here is part of the branch or world; their role is simply to register the fact that it exists, not to have created it.
Why isn’t this reasoning used to criticize and rule out theories in which the existence of worlds and branches is vague and definition-dependent? This is what the post is actually about. At some level, it must be nothing more than a failure to combine fact A (this interpretation says worlds in the wavefunction are vague) with fact B (the existence of the real world can’t be vague) in order to draw the obvious conclusion (this interpretation must be wrong). But how does this work psychologically? I was hoping some believers in the “Oxford school” would describe how they arrived at their belief, but it seems I first have to communicate why this belief is so problematic.
Mitchell, you are on to an important point: Observers must be well-defined.
Worlds are not well-defined, and there is no definite number of worlds (given standard physics).
You may be interested in my proposed Many Computations Interpretation, in which observers are identified not with so-called ‘worlds’ but with implementations of computations:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0544
“The error” could mean: the false thing that is being asserted; the reason why it is false; or the cognitive mistake which allows it to escape detection.
Maybe I should begin with the true thing that is being asserted! Which is that the number of ink blots can depend on definition, or on the judgment or whim of the individual observer. That is indeed true.
It also may or may not be true that the number of branches, worlds, blobs, etc., in a wavefunction is similarly undefined, or dependent on a somewhat arbitrary definition.
What I deem to be categorically false is the proposition that this is also true of “observers”, or “portions of reality that can contain observers” (which might be called worlds or branches), or even just “portions of reality like the one that I find myself in” (which is a definition not involving observers, except incidentally).
The reason that this is false, is that the arbitrariness of the number of blobs, arises from the arbitrariness of their definition. Their very existence is in some sense arbitrary, relative, observer-dependent. It is because their existence is relative, that their number is relative.
The existence of the observed portion of reality is not “relative”; it is definitely there, and it is not caused by the contingent and changeable decisions of some observer about how to divide up reality. On the contrary, the observer here is part of the branch or world; their role is simply to register the fact that it exists, not to have created it.
Why isn’t this reasoning used to criticize and rule out theories in which the existence of worlds and branches is vague and definition-dependent? This is what the post is actually about. At some level, it must be nothing more than a failure to combine fact A (this interpretation says worlds in the wavefunction are vague) with fact B (the existence of the real world can’t be vague) in order to draw the obvious conclusion (this interpretation must be wrong). But how does this work psychologically? I was hoping some believers in the “Oxford school” would describe how they arrived at their belief, but it seems I first have to communicate why this belief is so problematic.
Mitchell, you are on to an important point: Observers must be well-defined.
Worlds are not well-defined, and there is no definite number of worlds (given standard physics).
You may be interested in my proposed Many Computations Interpretation, in which observers are identified not with so-called ‘worlds’ but with implementations of computations: http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0544
See my blog for further discussion: http://onqm.blogspot.com/