On 3/31/2014 6:00 PM, LizR wrote:
On 1 April 2014 06:04, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
The price is not having a unified 'self' - which many people would consider
a big
price since all observation and record keeping which is used to empirically
test
theories assumes this unity. If you observe X and you want to use that as
empircal
test of a theory it isn't helpful if your theory of the instruments says
they also
recorded not-X.
(I suspect some people would consider it a big price not to have a unified self for
other reasons, too!)
I can't see how it's worse for your theory to say that your instruments "will record X
and not X" as opposed to saying they "will record X or not X, but we don't know which".
That's before the fact. I didn't write "will". MWI is a theory that says when you read
your instrument and it says X, it's only one of an infinite set some of which say X and
some say not-X.
The former explanation says there will be apparent but explicable randomness, the latter
says there will be intrinsic and inexplicable randomness.
But is it explicable. Bruno is careful to refer to "uncertainty" or "indeterminancy".
Those are not necessarily probabilities unless they can be quantified to satisfy
Kolomogorov's axioms - and it's not clear to me that they can. The axioms require that
the set of "everything" have measure 1. But in this case "everything" is ill defined and
uncountably infinite. In common applications of QM one assumes isolation and considers
only a small (at least finite) set of possible results - which works FAPP.
Brent
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