On 1/9/2025 2:37 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
Seems to me a good summary 😉
Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 11:33, PGC <multiplecit...@gmail.com> a écrit :
This is getting circular. Brent’s single-world view treats the
wavefunction ∣Ψ⟩=∑iαi∣ϕi⟩ as purely instrumental: it calculates
probabilities for each outcome, but in the end only one outcome
(∣ϕk⟩) “actually happens.” Everything else is declared “not
real.” This works fine for making predictions, yet offers no
deeper reason why all other ∣ϕj⟩ (j=k) must be forcibly
nullified. One must simply accept that, by some extra postulate or
interpretation, the other possibilities vanish.
Quentin’s many-worlds (or “all possibilities realized”) approach
skips that forced collapse. Instead of removing alternate terms,
it treats each ∣ϕj⟩ as persisting in a branching global state.
The “randomness” we see is then about which branch “we” (as
observers) occupy, rather than an inexplicable destruction of
non-selected outcomes. So there’s no logical step that says,
“Everything else is disallowed”; it’s all there in the broader
superposition. Probabilities emerge from relative measures of
those branches rather than from an unexplained single selection.
In short, Brent’s stance is instrumentally consistent but depends
on an unelaborated principle that kills off every competing
outcome. Quentin’s stance avoids such “negation” by allowing all
terms of the wavefunction to proceed. Whether that’s too big an
ontological leap is a separate debate—but it at least doesn’t
require a special rule that says, “Only one of these can exist;
the rest never happened.” Brent, you're asking for "extra
negation", pretending that you simplify when in fact, you add a
whole new assumption. Similar to atheists who need to use the
notion of god to assert ~god, thinking rather simplistically that
you've cleaned up the whole mess.
Nothing extra. It's know as "saving the phenomenon".
I've never seen people so enamored of a philosophical rule-of-thumb that
they defend an extravagant ontology as though their souls were on the line.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/6dc7d349-1971-48bc-b933-db245f65f739%40gmail.com.
