Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tjradcliffe 3933 days ago
I agree on the phrasing issue. Both there "types" seem to require Bohr's classical observer, but as soon as you assume that observers are classical you've swept the big question under the carpet, which is, "Why is there a classical world at all?" Decoherence and similar approaches at least try to address this question, and don't fit at all well with their two-Type scheme.

Or to put it another way: observers are intrinsic to reality as well as the systems under observation, and any attempt to treat them separately will fail. But this is uninteresting, because any interpretation is going to have to acknowledge this at some level (as Bohr correctly pointed out quite a long time ago.)

1 comments

If you've got Many Worlds at the back of your mind there, rest assured (!) that the lead author considers it to be a Type-I interpretation See http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.04711v1.pdf