> On 31 Jul 2018, at 21:46, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/31/2018 9:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>>> On 30 Jul 2018, at 22:27, Brent Meeker <[email protected] 
>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 7/30/2018 9:58 AM, John Clark wrote:
>>>>   > Forget collapse.
>>>> Many, perhaps most, physicists do exactly that because they believe in the 
>>>> "Shut Up And Calculate" quantum interpretation and are only interested in 
>>>> predicting how far to the right a indicator needle on a meter moves in a 
>>>> particular experiment. But                       for some of us that feels 
>>>> unsatisfying and would like to have a deeper understanding about what's 
>>>> going on at the quantum level and wonder why there is nothing in the 
>>>> mathematics that says anything about a wave collapsing. 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> That's not true.  "The mathematics" originally included the Born rule as 
>>> part of the axiomatic structure of QM.  
>> 
>> In the usual QM, yes. But this use a vague notion of observer, and a 
>> seemingly forbidden process, a projection (a Kestrel!), I mean forbidden if 
>> we apply the wave to the couple observer-particle.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>>> Most of all they want to know what exactly is a "measurement" and why it 
>>>> so mysterious. 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> The problem with the Born rule was that its application was ambiguous:
>> 
>> Ah! Exactly.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Where was the Heisenberg cut? Why was "the needle basis" preferred?  But 
>>> decoherence theory has given answers (at least partially) to those 
>>> questions.  Given those answers, one can just replace "collapse" with 
>>> "discard", i.e. discard all the predicted possible results except the one 
>>> observed.  Is there really any difference between saying those other 
>>> predictions of the wf are in orthogonal, inaccessible "worlds" and saying 
>>> they just didn't happen.  That seems to be Omnes approach.  He writes, 
>>> "Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory, so it only predicts 
>>> probabilities.”
>> 
>> 
>> OK, but the honest, and perhaps naive inquirer would like to have an idea 
>> about what are those probabilities about, and where they come from.
> 
> That was the source of resistance to Born's paper.  Physicists assumed that 
> probability could only arise from ignorance of an ensemble.  Since there was 
> no ensemble in Heisenberg's (or Schroedinger's) QM they resisted the idea.  
> Lots of attempts were made to reintroduce ensembles, or at least virtual 
> ensembles, so that they could feel comfortable with having a probabilistic 
> theory.  Omnes' is just saying "Get over it!"; probabilities are fundamental. 


Yes, but he said all this after defending Everett (or its own better version of 
Everett). Then, this introduces a notion of ensemble (the set of all consistent 
histories), and, at least in some book, just ask us to be irrational and to 
dismiss the ensemble at make probability fundamental, only to make the “other 
worlds” disappear. In one book he lakes clear that such a decision is 
irrational, and that he makes it because he dislike of find shocking the idea 
that all quantum possible outcome are realised. It is a bit like a christian 
who understand the evolution theory, but add that it makes just God having 
invented evolution instead of Adam. 



> Everett's MWI is appealing to the same intuition...that probabilities must 
> refer to ensembles. 

Wich in my opinion is the only way to make sense of any notion of 
probabilities. You need a space or set of events too which the probabilities 
applies.  



> So the ensemble will be multiple-worlds.  But that didn't really work because 
> Schroedinger's equation didn't predict multiple worlds with the right ratios, 
> it just gave real number probabilities.  So people like Bohm and Bruno 
> invented infinite ensembles to explain the probability numbers.  Which is OK, 
> but one should recognize that they are not just explicating Schroedinger's 
> equation.

There is no probabilities at all in the schroedinger equation. But then that 
equation describes also a vast set of relative state describing indexical 
probabilities. It is really similar to the WM-duplication. From the 3p 
perspective, there is no probabilities at all, but the duplication (and 
mechanism) explains entirely why all first person concerned (having done the 
self-duplication) encounter probabilities. Somehow, Shannon entropy, or 
Botzmann, use something similar. 

Bruno




> 
> Brent
> 
>> Now, the computationalists expected exactly that kind of probabilities, on 
>> the computations, as the “step 3”, but mainly the “step 4”, i.e. the 
>> unawareness of the basic computation “time” (the number of steps in the 
>> universal dovetailing or the length of the proof of a sigma_1 sentence), 
>> 
>> It is all in head of the universal machine!
>> 
>> The existence of the universal machine is assured by Robinson Arithmetic, or 
>> the combinator theory, as can been proved by all Löbian combinators.
>> 
>> Bruno
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> Brent
>>> 
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