[spacehome]

Bring it back to the scientific method. The way to differentiate between competing hypotheses is by devising experiments that falsify some of them, and then running the experiments and either falsifying or failing to falsify them.

The issue here is subtle, and it's that the most popular interpretation, Copenhagen, isn't a complete theory because it doesn't tell you algorithmically when collapse occurs. For any possible algorithmic way to handle collapse, there's a corresponding experiment that could (at least in theory) differentiate between Copenhagen and Many Worlds. But the Copenhagen is inordinately slippery in that collapse is defined to occur ex post facto in whatever way is needed to make the experimental results match the theoretical results.

It's perhaps not so surprising that this shortcoming was overlooked in the beginning because Copenhagen was hypothesized before we really had a clear handle on the study of algorithms. But the fact that Copenhagen is still as popular as it is means that Yudkowski needs to spend a lot of time on philosophy of science, because that's what's holding back most people from seeing the problems with Copenhagen, and why at first glance it looks like philosophy.

[sriku]

spacehome suggested reading Elizer's posts on quantum physics precisely to not bother to deal with outdated statements like "the most popular interpretation, Copenhagen". Afaik, no serious physicist uses this any more, not even to explain quantum theory. To use wavefunction collapse to "explain" QM is like invoking "God" to explain the universe - i.e. it is not much of an explanation, and it raises more questions than it answers.

Text books ought to be rewritten to teach decoherence instead of outdated stuff like wave-particle duality, wavefunction collapse and such. That is the history of the development of QM and not QM as it is known today, in my limited knowledge.

If you get decoherence, much of the "mysteriousness" and "spookiness" that's talked about in such magazines just disappears and you find them all, every one of them, shallow.

[acqq]

I think I can agree with your first paragraph, even if I'd phrase it somewhat differently, but I don't see the connection between it and the next two.

[spacehome]

I certainly meant those three paragraphs to be connected; perhaps I'm just poor at explaining. As I mentioned, the shortcomings of the Copenhagen Interpretation are subtle, and I originally linked to Yudkowski's treatment because I believe he does much better job of explaining it than I ever could.

[acqq]

Allow me to not agree with your classification of the top article as "garbage." I've got from it more than from the text you linked to and I'm even less satisfied with your explanations whereas Natalie Wolchover did a rather good article. Please tell me if you have any background in physics, or what is your background?

The major thing missing from the article for me is that she didn't mention that the co-author of the most recent paper on the topic is much more known as the security researcher than as somebody who does anything related to quantum physics:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_J._Anderson

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/

He's author of (to me) very useful book "Security Engineering":

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html