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by crontumCombudor 3865 days ago
You know it's all just an artifact of an expression written on paper, right?
1 comments

What do you mean by that?

(Obviously you don't mean necessarily literally on paper)

Do you claim that the predictions that are made about what is observed are false, or that the interpretation is wrong, or?

Surely you don't mean that by interpreting it in a particular way, it causes different things to happen, so I can't think of anything other than those two.

I think he means that the "entanglement" as understood by general public, i.e. as "I do something to particle A, and suddenly particle B changes" is an invalid way of reading the math; you didn't do anything to B, you merely figured out, by interacting with A, in which world you're in.
You see, this is the thing that kills me when thinking about the quantum world. The Many Worlds interpretation is so clean and obvious, except for one thing - it requires creating a new universe for each quantum entanglement event. Gah!

Of course that does make me think about forking processes and copy-on-write, and the idea that our reality is just a simulation in a computer and that maybe creating new universes is not as expensive as we might at first think...

I'm starting to think about this along the "zero-worlds interpretation" - i.e. there is only one world, but it's not based on discrete particles with states, but on probability distributions. We perceive the world as if it was already mostly simple, but it's because we too are entangled with stuff. There are no many worlds of particles, because particles are not the building blocks of a world. If you look at it from the hypothetical computer simulating us, it's kind of like storing the set of all natural numbers - you can store slices of it in lists (and then quantum entanglement under MWI works by figuring out in which list you are) vs. storing a generator function.

I admit I'm still in the process of learning and figuring this stuff out.