Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DiogenesKynikos 2111 days ago
> We experience one reality, not many realities.

How does MWI imply that we should simultaneously experience multiple realities? If two different states of you experience two different realities, each state of you is only aware of one reality.

MWI largely reduces to something like the Copenhagen interpretation for large systems. It's just that MWI explains the transition between the quantum and classical regime, doesn't require any ad hoc rules about observers, and doesn't need Schrödinger's equation to be violated.

1 comments

The claim wasn't that we should experience inaccessible worlds for MWI to be compatible with our experience of reality. That's obviously absurd.

The claim was that inaccessible worlds are inherently incompatible with our ability to empirically investigate or falsify them (via experience).

MWI has a metaphysical parsimony to it. But to believe it's physics is religious faith not physical science- and that's fine, but it's still not science.

I don't think collapse is real either. I think it's a phenomenological byproduct of consciousness requiring particilarity to model the world it perceives. You've already alluded to that being the case ('we can only experience our worldline').

If you knew the metaphysics behind that particularity well enough, you'd also know that it leaves no ground for and has no need of the existence of a physical material reality to begin with. As such, materialist physics has already made an epistemic leap which inevitably leads to mistaken intuitions about the most reasonable ways to interpret empirical phenomena.

> The claim was that inaccessible worlds are inherently incompatible with our ability to empirically investigate or falsify them

That's not what the claim was. The original claim was that MWI is "incompatible with our experience of reality." TheOtherHobbes then said that the incompatibility is that we experience only one reality, instead of many realities.

> MWI has a metaphysical parsimony to it. But to believe it's physics is religious faith not physical science- and that's fine, but it's still not science.

It's not religion to point out that QM explains the phenomenon of wavefunction collapse without any additional postulates (through decoherence). That's all that MWI says.