| Why are 'we' or 'measurements' things of special status? Because we experience the world through our senses. Everything else is one mathematical model or another that we’ve created. And our models aren’t even consistent! very painful point about the copenhagen interpretation is this distinction between 'normal' time evolution and the special procedure when a 'measurement' is carried out This is not a special procedure. Measurement occurs whenever physical interactions take place. To measure a particle, we bounce another particle off of it and then try to detect the result. The measurement is the particle collision, not the detection. It’s like playing billiards in the dark. We don’t know where the balls are. Taking 'a mathematical construct as more real than basic empirical experiences' is basically the history of physics and it has in the past been highly successful. Except for all of the times when it broke down. When one model was found to contradict our experiments and we had to replace it with another, which later turned out to be wrong as well. Perhaps the most embarrassing example of this, in human history, is all of our attempts to make geocentric models work [1]. The most well-known critique of science’s institutional habit of inventing new models whenever old ones broke down is probably Kuhn’s paradigms [2]. If you’re interested, you’re better off reading Kuhn than anything I have to write here. I think the best evidence for Kuhn’s thesis is the abject disappointment we witness every time particle physicists fail to overturn the standard model. If that’s not supremacy of measurement, then I don’t what is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... |
When two particles bounce off each other, there is no collapse according to traditional copenhagen, instead the wave function just evolves according to the SE. Even worse, when that particle (let's say photon) then travels to the measurement device to interact with the particles that make up that machine, the evolution is similarly governed by the SE. Somehow though at some point, nature decides that a measurement has taken place and collapses the wave function. What dictates where that happens? Honestly this way of thinking about it makes no sense to me. The MWI is, to my mind, the simplest explanation for all of this mayhem.