On 6/06/2016 9:24 am, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 6/5/2016 4:05 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
I don't think anyone (except Joy Christian) argues that Bell's
theorem does not apply in MWI - I certainly don't think that.
That was the central argument that sought to establish that MWI was
local -- MWIers claim that Bell assumed something in his proof that
does not hold in MWI, so the theorem does not apply to MWI. The
conclusion they want to draw is that since the Bell inequalities are
inapplicable in MWI, observation of violations of the inequalities
can not be interpreted as evidence of non-locality. I think that
argument is dead -- Bell did not assume counterfactual definiteness,
I guess it depends on what fact you counter. Even if the hidden
variable is probabilistic, its the realized random value that is
shared by the particles and so that's implicitly assuming
counterfactual definiteness at the hidden variable level: if the
random value had been something else the measurement values would be
something different.
That is built into the generic concept of hidden variables that Bell
uses -- they can (probabilistically) take on a range of values, and the
measurement results will depend on what value they have in any
particular instance. There is no assumption of conterfactual
definiteness embedded here, or anywhere else for that matter. (Other
than the bland statement that if things had been different, things would
have been different!)
Bruce
and even if he did, that would not have affected his proof. Also, he
did not need to assume that experiments had only one result -- the
theorem applies to correlations between decohered experimental
results, and thus applies equally to all branches of the wave
function (if you want to think in MWI terms).
Right.
Brent
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