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This feels like a cop out. Like sure, you can just do the math and get results and not worry about it. But what's the motivation here? When you get down to it, he seems to believe many-worlds is true, BUT holds the philosophical position that you shouldn't, like, care. Because there's no practical benefit to caring; because it doesn't help you with the calculations. But, hey, I still care! What the real nature of rea…
This feels like a cop out. Like sure, you can just do the math and get results and not worry about it. But what's the motivation here? When you get down to it, he seems to believe many-worlds is true, BUT holds the philosophical position that you shouldn't, like, care. Because there's no practical benefit to caring; because it doesn't help you with the calculations. But, hey, I still care! What the real nature of rea…
The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26363004 - March 2021 (64 comments)
The right frame of mind is not "shut up and calculate", it's "shut up and make testable hypotheses and then invalidate them experimentally".
The blog post’s Zen approach sounds like an agnostic stance, which probably isn’t a bad thing in that regard.
The article misses that we do not know how classical world that we perceive arises. Ultimately according to QM the whole universe is just single wave function with no probabilities. But this contradicts our experience of the classical world including that we measure probabilities. So we need to explain that to avoid various very ad-hock notions of classical measurement device and similar routes. There are attempts to…
In the single wavefunction, beings who perceive classical reality arise from mere wavefunction mathematics. How does this not answer the question? Once you can locate yourself in a system, the system is adequate as a physical theory of your phenomenological state.
What I don't get is why people are more concerned with how Qauntum Mechanics works than they are with the way in which, for example, electro magenetic waves travel in a vacuum. Like we can "physically" understand how sound travels, and we can "visualise" that as a "mechanism" right? But we have no similar way of "physicalising" the way in which light travels, but no-one seems to have any trouble accepting that. Quant…
Quantum mechanics has wave function collapse, which is both essential in applying the theory to explain any physical situation, and at the same time not described by the theory. Other than "and then it collapses". Classical theories don't have this problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the single wavefunction, beings who perceive classical reality arise from mere wavefunction mathematics. How does this not answer the question? Once you can locate yourself in a system, the system is adequate as a physical theory of your phenomenological state.
This does not explain how a classical observer gets probabilities that are precisely measured. In universe-as-a-wave-function there are no probabilities. So how exactly do they arise and what they mean?
Scott's answer to this seems like a cop-out. He's basically saying "I can't tell which things are epistemic or ontic, and this all seems very complicated, so I'm going to assume the distinction doesn't exist."