On 2 March 2015 at 17:24, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Russell Standish wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Mar 01, 2015 at 07:48:49PM -0800, meekerdb wrote:
>>
>>> On 3/1/2015 6:29 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
>>>
>>>> I remain unconvinced that that probabilities are undefined.
>>>>
>>>> Tegmark gave an interesting version of how to get Born's rule from
>>>> MWI, which seemed to have legs. Deutsch gave one based on decision
>>>> theory that is admittedly unsatisfying.
>>>>
>>>> My own derivation simply assumed that observers had measure. The
>>>> probability of an outcome is proportional to the measure of the
>>>> observers
>>>>
>>> What's "the measure of the observers"?  That's usually where the
>>> implicit assumption of Born's rule sneaks in.
>>>
>>>
>> It's not implicit, but quite explicit that observers are drawn from an
>> ensemble of all possible observers with an associated
>> measure. Somewhat later, we identify that measure with the complex
>> magnitude of the QM state vector. It is still problematic that the
>> measure turns out to be complex, rather than say quaternionic or
>> something more general, though.
>>
>> I don't see it as implicitly assuming Born's rule, though. The exact
>> functional dependence of probability on the observer's state could be
>> anything, but it turns out it has to be given by Born's rule (assuming
>> Kolmogorov's probability axioms, of course).
>>
>
> In other words, it doesn't appear to avaoid the problem with MWI pointed
> out by Dawid and Thebault:
>
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9542/1/Decoherence_Archive.pdf
>
> You effectively assume the Born rule in order to get your ensemble of
> observers out of the superposition.


Do superpositions still occur in the MWI? I thought they were supposed to
be branches (which are perhaps able to recombine) ?

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