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by lisper
367 days ago
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> The math tells that there are no privileged parts of wave function. That's true. But my senses tell me that there is a privileged part of the wave function, namely, the branch that I'm in. The way I think about it nowadays is that QM is like a Necker cube. You can look at it in two different ways. You can take the God's-eye view and look at the entire wave function, or you can take the mortal's eye view and look at only a proper subset of the wave function (which is necessary in order to recover classical reality). But you can't do both at the same time. For my day-to-day life, I have no choice but to take the mortal's-eye view because I am a mortal. All of the things that matter to me depend on classical reality, and so depend on my suspension of disbelief and acting as if my branch of the multiverse is privileged, even if I can intellectually jump out of the system momentarily and recognize that the mortal's eye view is necessarily incomplete. > Didn't you admit yourself that if MWI works it's a big deal and will kick the chair from under other interpretations? That depends on what you mean by "works". If someone can derive the Born rule from the Schrodinger equation that will be a big deal, a slam-dunk Nobel prize. But no one has done it, and I'm pretty sure it can't be done. I'm pretty sure that the Born rule is an emergent property of our branch of the multiverse. I believe the same is true of the Second Law and even three-dimensional space. You can slice-and-dice the wave function to give you physical spaces with any number of dimensions, but three is the magic number that gives you atoms and stars and planets with stable orbits [1] and so on. So I'm pretty sure the Born rule can only be explained by the anthropic principle. There's probably a Nobel prize waiting for the person who turns that intuition into a theorem. --- [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/50142/gravity-in... |
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You could also sense that your location is privileged, because the observable universe is neatly centered at it, but science will prioritize Copernican principle over your senses.
>But you can't do both at the same time.
This doesn't match what you do. Tracing extracts mortal's-eye view from God's-eye view, so in God's-eye view you have both.
>depend on my suspension of disbelief and acting as if my branch of the multiverse is privileged
If your branch exists, it's sufficient for your day to day life, there's not much else to disbelieve. There's no need for it to be privileged. Do you worry that Earth isn't more privileged than Mars?
>But no one has done it, and I'm pretty sure it can't be done.
But quantum physics doesn't allow it. It's quantitative science where all observed phenomena are computable. If they aren't computable, then quantum physics doesn't predict them and thus diverges from observation. And Schrödinger equation is how predictions are made, collapse and measurement only act on what already exists before them and don't create anything new. So if Born rule is an observed phenomenon, it must be computable from Schrödinger equation. Also if Born rule holds with certainty, then it's a pure state, and observation won't do anything to it, so Born rule can't be created by observation.
>There's probably a Nobel prize waiting for the person who turns that intuition into a theorem.
This was argued by Max Tegmark https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9702052 I thought it's a famous diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacetime_dimensionality....