On 12/20/2021 5:10 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 11:53 AM Jesse Mazer <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 7:01 PM John Clark <[email protected]>
wrote:
Brent Meeker <[email protected]>Wrote:
/> Yes, it's empirically supported; So's the
Schroedinger equation. But it's part of the application
of the Schroedinger equation. It's not in the equation
itself. /
> I don't know what you mean by that.
/> It's the projection postulate in the Copenhagen
interpretation that applies the Born rule. In MWI it's
the Born rule plus some kind of self-locating uncertainty
to allow for the probabilistic observations. So those are
things not in the Schroedinger equation./
I don't know how you figure that. It has been mathematically
proven that the Born rule is the only way to get probabilities
out of Schrodinger's equation such that all the probabilities
add up to 1. And Schrodinger says an electron wave can be in
any location, and in a camera/electron wave a camera will
observe the electron being in every location, and in a Brent
Meeker/camera/electron wave there will be a Brent Meeker for
every camera that sees an electron in every location.
/> No, you can't observe the Born rule to be true any more
(or less) than you can observe Schroedinger's equation to
be true./
Nonsense! Every quantum physicist alive believes the Born rule
is valid and they use it every day, and the reason they're so
confident is because the Born rule has always conform with
observations and all empirical tests , so it doesn't need a
seal of approval from a theory for us to think it's true, but
a theory may need a seal of approval from the Born Rule to
convince us that a theory is true. That's because observation
always outranks theory.
But one of the big selling points of the MWI is to give some sort
of objective picture of reality in which "measurements" have no
distinguished role, but are simply treated using the usual rules
of quantum interactions.
At one time, that might have been a point on which to prefer MWI over
Bohr's version of the CI, but that is no longer true. Modern collapse
theories do not have to distinguish particular "measurement" events,
and do not have to assume a classical superstructure . In modern fGRW,
for example, everything can be treated as quantum, and the theory is
completely objective.
fGRW has the added advantage that it is an inherently stochastic
theory. Probability is treated as a primitive notion that is not based
on anything else. MWI struggles with the concept of probability, and
while it has to reject a frequentist basis for probability, it cannot
really supply anything else. Self-locating uncertainty does not, in
itself, serve to define probability. You have to have some notion of a
random selection from a set, and that is not available in either the
Schrodinger equation or in self-locating uncertainty.
In principle one should be able to empirically distinguish between wave
function "collapse" due to GRW or due to decoherence. It would take
extreme isolation to suppress decoherence though.
Brent
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