Well basically, we start off with the claim (which I can’t confirm of my own knowledge, but have no reason to doubt) that the Born rule has certain special properties, as explained in the original post.
We observe that the Born rule seems to be empirically true in our universe.
We would like an explanation as to why our universe exhibits a rule with special properties.
Consider the form this explanation must take. It can’t be because the Born rule is encoded into the ultimate laws of physics, because that would only push the mystery back a few steps. It should be a logical conclusion that we would observe the Born rule given any underlying physics (within reason).
Of course there is far too much armchair handwaving here to constitute proof, but I think it at least constitutes an interesting conjecture.
Well, even if it turns out that there’re special properties of our physics that are required to produce the Born rule, I’d say that mystery would be a different, well, kind of mystery. Right now it’s a bit of “wtf? where is this bizzaro subjective nonlinearity etc coming from? and it seems like something ‘extra’ tacked onto the physics”
If we could reduce that to “these specific physical laws give rise to it”, then even though we’d still have “why these laws and not others”, it would, in my view, be an improvement over the situation in which we seem to have an additional law that seems almost impossible to even meaningfully phrase without invoking subjective experience.
I do agree though that given the special properties of the rule, any special properties in the underlying physics that are needed to give rise to the rule should be in some sense “non arbitrary”… that is, should look like, well, like a nonaribitrarily selected physical rule.
Well basically, we start off with the claim (which I can’t confirm of my own knowledge, but have no reason to doubt) that the Born rule has certain special properties, as explained in the original post.
We observe that the Born rule seems to be empirically true in our universe.
We would like an explanation as to why our universe exhibits a rule with special properties.
Consider the form this explanation must take. It can’t be because the Born rule is encoded into the ultimate laws of physics, because that would only push the mystery back a few steps. It should be a logical conclusion that we would observe the Born rule given any underlying physics (within reason).
Of course there is far too much armchair handwaving here to constitute proof, but I think it at least constitutes an interesting conjecture.
Well, even if it turns out that there’re special properties of our physics that are required to produce the Born rule, I’d say that mystery would be a different, well, kind of mystery. Right now it’s a bit of “wtf? where is this bizzaro subjective nonlinearity etc coming from? and it seems like something ‘extra’ tacked onto the physics”
If we could reduce that to “these specific physical laws give rise to it”, then even though we’d still have “why these laws and not others”, it would, in my view, be an improvement over the situation in which we seem to have an additional law that seems almost impossible to even meaningfully phrase without invoking subjective experience.
I do agree though that given the special properties of the rule, any special properties in the underlying physics that are needed to give rise to the rule should be in some sense “non arbitrary”… that is, should look like, well, like a nonaribitrarily selected physical rule.