| > EY's particular brand of mysticism Funny how different people perceive his writings. To me, most of what he writes feels obvious —at least in retrospect. "Obvious" doesn't feel very mystic to me.
I do understand however how many people would be distrustful of his casual writing style. He tends to sound like a lowly blogger, not like a respectable academic. (Personally, I don't care for those status signals.) > I'll read that eventually, but I won't be surprised if it turns out to be like much of the rest of LW Hmm, if you're already familiar with this material, then don't bother just yet. Start with the first few chapters of E.T. Jayne's Probability Theory: the Logic of Science. That's more basic, less crazy sounding, and more generally applicable. Now I don't exactly know how physicists deal with quantum mechanics. I asked one, and he didn't even bother with any interpretation, sticking with the observable consequences of the equations (a more prudent attitude than either Copenhagen or Many-World). Something however bothers me deeply: insisting on calling amplitudes "probabilities", while they're anything but. That only makes teaching harder. Seriously, I was tempted to mass delete every occurrences of "probability" from the "Probability Amplitude" article in the Wikipedia. > If I were to stipulate that the Copenhagen interpretation(s) is (are) silly philosophical daydreaming, could you do the same for many-worlds? Err, it doesn't work like that. If I were to convince you, I would have learned nothing, and believe then what I believe now. I can only give you my current best guess. Which is, many-worlds is by no means certain. At the very least we don't have a Theory of Everything, and we could miss something. Collapse postulates however are just crazy. Rejecting the existence of the amplitude you didn't observe is just as insane (no less, no more) as rejecting the existence of a photon which just passed the limits of our observable universe. When we do find a theory of everything, I bet the equations will predict the existence of things that can't be observed —not even in theory. I just hope people won't see that as a licence to not believe in those things at all. |