On 3/9/2014 6:34 PM, LizR wrote:
On 10 March 2014 14:15, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:On 3/9/2014 5:36 PM, LizR wrote:Surely QM + collapse makes the prediction that there is a mechanism that causes the collapse (e.g. Penrose's idea about it being gravitational) and therefore predicts that at some point that mechanism will kick in, so we can only have superpositions up to a particular size?Just as there must be some mechanism that causes us to perceive only one reality, and not a superposition. I think that's been dealt with for the MWI, hasn't it? (But not yet for QM+collapse, AFAIK.)
So exactly how has MWI dealt with this? Everett just sort of said it has to be that way, i.e. humans are like measuring instruments and so they make measurements which diagonalize their reduced density matrix (but not the whole density matrix). But there's not really a theory of consciousness that tells us how it's like a measuring instrument AND, even if there were, there's not a theory that tells us why it's OK to diagonalize a part of the density matrix, but not all of it, in some basis we choose. Note that this is a purely mathematical operation we choose to do - not some physical process. Omnes looks at the same mathematical process and says, once we've diagonalized the reduced density matrix we've predicted probabilities, and so we should be satisfied that one of them is realized and with the predicted frequency.
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