On 10/13/2019 1:55 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
Sabine Hossenfelder
@skdh
Oh, they are not necessary. The other alternative is that you give up
on reductionism. Is that what you want to advocate?
Will Kinney @WKCosmo
·
If the theory matches reality, sure. I really fail to understand
physicists' attachment to a clockwork universe fully determined by
boundary conditions. Nature apparently doesn't work that way.
I think I'm with Kinney. I don't even see what accepting a
probabilistic interpretation of the density matrix has to do with
reductionism. Reductionism doesn't require that every event have a
deterministic cause...that just leads to an infinite regress, or a
supernatural first-cause.
The interpretation problem is why should the diagonal terms be given a
probability interpretation at all when in some other basis the density
matrix is not even approximately diagonal? And if it is given a
probability interpretation, what about the cases in which there are very
(arbitrarily) many vanishingly small diagonal terms whose total
probability is significant (or hard to prove they are not significant).
In other words can be justify the observed classical world as "typical"
or is it an improbable freak?
Brent
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