There’s more to Bohmian mechanics than you may think. There are actually observables whose expectation values correspond to the Bohmian trajectories—“weak-valued” position measurements. This is a mathematical fact that ought to mean something, but I don’t know what. Also, you can eliminate the pilot wave from Bohmian mechanics. If you start with a particular choice of universal wavefunction, that will be equivalent to adding a particular nonlocal potential to a classical equation of motion. That nonlocal potential might be the product of a holographic transformation away from the true fundamental degrees of freedom, or it might approximate the nonlocal correlations induced by planck-scale time loops in the spacetime manifold.
I have never found the time or the energy to do my own quantum sequence, so perhaps it’s my fault if I’m hard to understand. The impression of incoherence may also arise from the fact that I put out lots and lots of ideas. There are a lot of possibilities. But if you want an overall opinion on QM which you wish to be able to attribute to me, here it is:
The explanation of QM might be “Bohm”, “Everett”, “Cramer”, “’t Hooft”, or “None of the Above”. By “Bohm”, I don’t just mean Bohmian mechanics, I mean lines of investigation arising from Bohmian mechanics, like the ones I just described. The other names in quotes should be interpreted similarly.
Also, we are not in a position to say that one of these five approaches is clearly favored over the others. The first four are all lines of investigation with fundamental questions unanswered and fundamental issues unresolved, and yet they are the best specific proposals that we have (unless I missed one). It’s reasonable for a person to prefer one type of model, but in the current state of knowledge any such preference is necessarily superficial, and very liable to be changed by new information.
I have never found the time or the energy to do my own quantum sequence, so perhaps it’s my fault if I’m hard to understand. The impression of incoherence may also arise from the fact that I put out lots and lots of ideas.
Well, that’s understandable. Not everyone has all the free time in the world to write sequences.
It’s reasonable for a person to prefer one type of model, but in the current state of knowledge any such preference is necessarily superficial, and very liable to be changed by new information.
That’s exactly what I wish Yudkowsky’s argument in the QM sequence would have been, but for some reason he felt the need to forever crush the hopes and dreams of the people clinging to alternative interpretations, in a highly insulting manner. What ever happened to leaving a line of retreat?
That’s exactly what I wish Yudkowsky’s argument in the QM sequence would have been, but for some reason he felt the need to forever crush the hopes and dreams of the people clinging to alternative interpretations, in a highly insulting manner. What ever happened to leaving a line of retreat?
Something feels very wrong about this sentence… I get a nagging feeling that you believe he has a valid argument, but he should have been nice to people who are irrationally clinging to alternative interpretations, via such irrational ways as nitpicking on the unimportant details.
Meanwhile, a coherent hypothesis: the guy does not know QM, thinks he knows QM, proceeds to explain whatever simplistic nonsense he thinks is the understanding of QM, getting almost everything wrong. Then interprets the discrepancies in his favour, and feels incredibly intelligent.
Something feels very wrong about this sentence… I get a nagging feeling that you believe he has a valid argument, but he should have been nice to people who are irrationally clinging to alternative interpretations, via such irrational ways as nitpicking on the unimportant details.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
He “should have been nice to people” (without qualification) by not trying to draw (without a shred of credible evidence) a link between rationality/intelligence/g-factor and (even a justified amount of) MWI-skepticism. It’s hard to imagine a worse way to immediately put your audience on the defensive. It’s all there in the manual.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
Why do you think so? Quantum mechanics is complicated, and questions of what is a ‘better’ theory are very subtle.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple. You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
It’s all there in the manual.
He should have left a line of retreat for himself.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple.
My argument is distinct from Yudkowsky’s in that our claims are radically different. If you disagree that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen, I’d like to know why.
You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen. For example, the interferometer calculation is neither used as evidence that MWI is local, nor that MWI is less complicated. The calculation is independent of any interpretation, after all.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
if I stand a needle on it’s tip on a glass plate, will needle remain standing indefinitely? No it probably won’t even though by Occam’s razor, zero deviation from vertical is (arguably) more probable than any other specific deviation from vertical. MWI seems to require exact linearity, and QM and QFT don’t do gravity, i.e. are approximate. Linear is a first order approximation to nearly anything.
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen.
Intelligence and careful thinking --> getting easy stuff right and maybe (very rarely) getting hard stuff right.
Lack of intelligence and/or careful thinking --> getting easy stuff wrong and getting hard stuff certainly wrong.
What is straw Copenhagen anyway? Objective collapse caused by consciousness? Copenhagen is not objective collapse. It is a theory for predicting and modelling the observations. With the MWI you still need to single out one observer, because something happens in real world that does single out one observer, as anyone can readily attest, and so there’s no actual difference here in any math, it’s only a difference in how you look at this math.
edit: ghahahahaha, wait, you literally think it has higher probability? (i seen another of the Yudkowsky’s comments where he said something about his better understanding of probability theory) Well, here’s the bullet: the probability of our reality being quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, within platonic space, is 0 (basically, vanishingly small, predicated on the experiments confirming general relativity all failing), because gravity exists and works so and so but that’s not part of QFT. 0 times anything is still 0. (That doesn’t mean the probability of alternate realities is 0, if there can be such a thing)
There’s more to Bohmian mechanics than you may think. There are actually observables whose expectation values correspond to the Bohmian trajectories—“weak-valued” position measurements. This is a mathematical fact that ought to mean something, but I don’t know what. Also, you can eliminate the pilot wave from Bohmian mechanics. If you start with a particular choice of universal wavefunction, that will be equivalent to adding a particular nonlocal potential to a classical equation of motion. That nonlocal potential might be the product of a holographic transformation away from the true fundamental degrees of freedom, or it might approximate the nonlocal correlations induced by planck-scale time loops in the spacetime manifold.
I have never found the time or the energy to do my own quantum sequence, so perhaps it’s my fault if I’m hard to understand. The impression of incoherence may also arise from the fact that I put out lots and lots of ideas. There are a lot of possibilities. But if you want an overall opinion on QM which you wish to be able to attribute to me, here it is:
The explanation of QM might be “Bohm”, “Everett”, “Cramer”, “’t Hooft”, or “None of the Above”. By “Bohm”, I don’t just mean Bohmian mechanics, I mean lines of investigation arising from Bohmian mechanics, like the ones I just described. The other names in quotes should be interpreted similarly.
Also, we are not in a position to say that one of these five approaches is clearly favored over the others. The first four are all lines of investigation with fundamental questions unanswered and fundamental issues unresolved, and yet they are the best specific proposals that we have (unless I missed one). It’s reasonable for a person to prefer one type of model, but in the current state of knowledge any such preference is necessarily superficial, and very liable to be changed by new information.
Well, that’s understandable. Not everyone has all the free time in the world to write sequences.
That’s exactly what I wish Yudkowsky’s argument in the QM sequence would have been, but for some reason he felt the need to forever crush the hopes and dreams of the people clinging to alternative interpretations, in a highly insulting manner. What ever happened to leaving a line of retreat?
Something feels very wrong about this sentence… I get a nagging feeling that you believe he has a valid argument, but he should have been nice to people who are irrationally clinging to alternative interpretations, via such irrational ways as nitpicking on the unimportant details.
Meanwhile, a coherent hypothesis: the guy does not know QM, thinks he knows QM, proceeds to explain whatever simplistic nonsense he thinks is the understanding of QM, getting almost everything wrong. Then interprets the discrepancies in his favour, and feels incredibly intelligent.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
He “should have been nice to people” (without qualification) by not trying to draw (without a shred of credible evidence) a link between rationality/intelligence/g-factor and (even a justified amount of) MWI-skepticism. It’s hard to imagine a worse way to immediately put your audience on the defensive. It’s all there in the manual.
Why do you think so? Quantum mechanics is complicated, and questions of what is a ‘better’ theory are very subtle.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple. You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
He should have left a line of retreat for himself.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
My argument is distinct from Yudkowsky’s in that our claims are radically different. If you disagree that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen, I’d like to know why.
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen. For example, the interferometer calculation is neither used as evidence that MWI is local, nor that MWI is less complicated. The calculation is independent of any interpretation, after all.
if I stand a needle on it’s tip on a glass plate, will needle remain standing indefinitely? No it probably won’t even though by Occam’s razor, zero deviation from vertical is (arguably) more probable than any other specific deviation from vertical. MWI seems to require exact linearity, and QM and QFT don’t do gravity, i.e. are approximate. Linear is a first order approximation to nearly anything.
Intelligence and careful thinking --> getting easy stuff right and maybe (very rarely) getting hard stuff right.
Lack of intelligence and/or careful thinking --> getting easy stuff wrong and getting hard stuff certainly wrong.
What is straw Copenhagen anyway? Objective collapse caused by consciousness? Copenhagen is not objective collapse. It is a theory for predicting and modelling the observations. With the MWI you still need to single out one observer, because something happens in real world that does single out one observer, as anyone can readily attest, and so there’s no actual difference here in any math, it’s only a difference in how you look at this math.
edit: ghahahahaha, wait, you literally think it has higher probability? (i seen another of the Yudkowsky’s comments where he said something about his better understanding of probability theory) Well, here’s the bullet: the probability of our reality being quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, within platonic space, is 0 (basically, vanishingly small, predicated on the experiments confirming general relativity all failing), because gravity exists and works so and so but that’s not part of QFT. 0 times anything is still 0. (That doesn’t mean the probability of alternate realities is 0, if there can be such a thing)