Re: Many-Worlds Interpretation - Questions?

sayfadeen@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The question really is what is this thing we experience and call
reality? At any moment, it is seems to be _a_ particular state out of
all that are superimposed. The prior moment was a superposition that
could evolve into the current one and within that is a state that can,
physics permitting, become the current one. Thus our experience is
one of continuity for that reason alone. It is just an illusion that
there is a state of "reality" with a historical record of wave
function collapses. It's a pretty useful illusion, however. :-)

Fascinating. Yes, it makes much more sense to me now...what was
tripping me up was the all-too-literal interpretation of branching,

Yeah, I was in the same place. There is a group at the free NNTP
server news.gmane.org where things were better explained to me. The
group's name is gmane.science.physics.fabric-of-reality and it is not
terribly active. The group seemed well inclined toward naive
questions when I was visiting it. Deutsch makes an occasional appearance.

I wasn't seeing that this was a phenomena that just effects the
observer (which if I'm correct, can be anything that physically
registers or detects, not just a conscious mind), and that this is
cutting the observer off from one part of the larger, superposition
multiverse.

That's not quite the understanding I came to. In the multiverse there
are infinite "versions" of me (to which everything that could have
happened to me did and to which everything that can happen will)
existing as states within the mother superposition. Any of them is as
real as the next and even as real as what we have come to think of as
experience. One of them is that of me in a momentary state which
feels like this reality to "me" at that moment. I find this aspect
not too difficult to envision but really hard to talk about or describe.

Ah, that was going to be my next question. By a scattering event, you
mean electron scattering and such?

I'm not really sure that is technically the correct term for what I'm
trying to convey. To put it differently, there are quantum
interactions which have a continuous range of the values of some
observable (unlike spin which apparently has two values) and the
superposition which results from that interaction must include all of
them. Being continuous in range implies a superposition with an
infinite measure of states. (There are leading edge guys who work on
the idea that nothing is really continuous but always ends at some
discrete granularity and that may imply a finite measure of states
from any such interaction but I don't pretend to understand that stuff
at all.)

It doesn't seem to violate Occam's Razor to me; I suppose the obvious
thing is that by calling it "many-worlds" one is, by definition,
multiplying the entities, but (if I've understood correctly), it's not
multiplying the entitities at all, any more then the entitites are
already "multiplied" by positing the existence of a superposition.

My feeling too.

It's just an attempt to describe how those entities are observed/registered.

I think it's more that the existence of a state in the mother
superposition with us in it implies what we call an observation or
experience of it. It really isn't "registered" in the sense that I
think you mean because that implies the process of collapse which has
lost meaning in MWI. What I call "me" is a much more tenuous
proposition than I had previously thought.

One of the many implications of this is that since the evolution of
the wave function is entirely deterministic then so is the multiverse
and the future of it as an ensemble of superimposed states is just as
decisively programmed as was the past. Back to the old arguments
about "free will" whatever that might mean.

I think Einstein would like this interpretation because those pesky
dice he had such a distaste for just vanish.

As for the issue of falsifiability, is anything really falsifiable in
such a multiverse?


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler."

A. Einstein
.

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