I’m not talking about the implications of the hypothesis, I’m pointing out the hypothesis itself is incomplete. To simplify, if you observe an electron which has a 25% chance of spin up and 75% chance of spin down, naive MWI predicts that one version of you sees spin up and one version of you sees spin down. It does not explain where the 25% or 75% numbers come from. Until we have a solution to that problem (and people are trying), you don’t have a full theory that gives predictions, so how can you estimate it’s kolmogorov complexity?
I am a physicist who works in a quantum related field, if that helps you take my objections seriously.
Is it impossible that someday someone will derive the Born rule from Schrodinger’s equation (plus perhaps some of the “background assumptions” relied on by the MWI)?
Could it be you? Maybe you have a thought on what I said in this other comment?
They also implicitly claim that in order for the Born rule to work [under pilot wave], the particles have to start the sim following the psi^2 distribution. I thinkk this is just false, and eg a wide normal distribution will converge to psi^2 over time as the system evolves. (For a non-adversarially-chosen system.) I don’t know how to check this. Has someone checked this? Am I looking at this right?
The wrong part is mostly in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.7577.pdf, but: indexical probabilities of being a copy are value-laden—seems like the derivation first assumes that branching happens globally and then assumes that you are forbidden to count different instantiations of yourself, that were created by this global process.
Being uncertain of the implications of the hypothesis has no bearing on the Kolmogorv complexity of a hypothesis.
I’m not talking about the implications of the hypothesis, I’m pointing out the hypothesis itself is incomplete. To simplify, if you observe an electron which has a 25% chance of spin up and 75% chance of spin down, naive MWI predicts that one version of you sees spin up and one version of you sees spin down. It does not explain where the 25% or 75% numbers come from. Until we have a solution to that problem (and people are trying), you don’t have a full theory that gives predictions, so how can you estimate it’s kolmogorov complexity?
I am a physicist who works in a quantum related field, if that helps you take my objections seriously.
Is it impossible that someday someone will derive the Born rule from Schrodinger’s equation (plus perhaps some of the “background assumptions” relied on by the MWI)?
People keep coming up with derivations, and other people keep coming up with criticisms of them, which is why people keep coming up with new ones.
Didn’t Carroll already do that? Is something still missing?
No, I don’t believe he did, but I’ll save the critique of that paper for my upcoming “why MWI is flawed” post.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Sean Carroll already did that!
Carroll’s additional assumptions are not relied on by the MWI.
Could it be you? Maybe you have a thought on what I said in this other comment?
OK, what exactly is wrong with Sean Carroll’s derivation?
The wrong part is mostly in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.7577.pdf, but: indexical probabilities of being a copy are value-laden—seems like the derivation first assumes that branching happens globally and then assumes that you are forbidden to count different instantiations of yourself, that were created by this global process.