Thanks to Eliezer’s QM series, I’m starting to have enough background to understand Robin’s paper (kind of, maybe). And now that I do (kind of, maybe), it seems to me that Robin’s point is completely demolished by Wallace’s points about decoherence being continuous rather than discrete and therefore there being no such thing as a number of discrete worlds to count.
There seems to be nothing to resolve between the probabilities given by measure and the probabilities implied by world count if you simply say that measure is probability.
Eliezer objects. We’re interpreting. We’re adding something outside the mathematics.
I fail to see the problem.
If we’re to accept that particles moving like billiard balls are an illusion, and configuration space is real, and blobs of amplitude are real, and time evolution of amplitude within configuration space according to the wave equations is real, and that configurations and amplitude and wave equations are fundamental parts of reality, because that’s the best model we’ve come up with that agrees with experimental observation… why not accept that the modulus-squared law is real and fundamental, too?
It certainly agrees with experimental observations, and doesn’t seem any less desirable a part of our model of reality than configurations, amplitude blobs, and wave equations.
I wish someone would explain the problem more clearly, although if Eliezer’s explanations so far haven’t cleared it up for me yet, perhaps nothing will.
Ben: It’s simulations all the way up.