On 6/20/2019 11:49 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 4:26 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
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On 6/20/2019 11:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
After all, repetitions of the relevant interactions are
happening all the time: and not just in our controlled
experiments. How can there be such things as objective
probabilities in the MWI scenario? How can we use
experimental evidence to support theories when we do not
know whether our observer probabilities are representative
or not?
The same as in any probabilistic theory. We repeat it so
many times that we have statistics that we can compare to the
theoretical distribution. The same way you would test your
theory that a coin was fair.
In other words, MWI is experimentally disconfirmed.
How so? In repeated experiments I'm aware of (and a lot of
photons go thru Aspect's EPR experiments) the statistics are
consistent with the theory. To disconfirm MWI you'd have to
observe statistics far from the expected value, which is why
Tegmark proposed his machine gun suicide experiment.
If you observe statistics far from those expected under the Born Rule
you just assume that your calculation of the wave function is in error!
If MWI is true, then you would expect that in at least some cases, the
Born Rule would be disconfirmed.
But that's equally true if the MWI is false. The Born rule is
probabilistic and so it predicts that there will be a certain proportion
of results which are far from the expected...just that they will be rare.
There necessarily exists branches of the wave function in which this
is the case. How can you be sure that were are not on such a branch?
We can't. Statistical results never provide certainty. But given a
result we can use Bayesian inference to quantify how strong is the
evidence it provides for or against the probabilistic theory.
On some branches, you can send a large number of photons to your half
silvered mirror, and observe that the results conform to binomial
statistics with p = 0.5. But then next long sequence of photons will
all go just one way,
Will they? Has this been measured? If the sequence is long enough it
would be strong evidence against QM.
casting doubt on your earlier statistics. Since such branches
necessarily exist under MWI, how can one ever have confidence in the
results of any quantum experiment?
In other words, in order to do experiments in quantum optics, one has
to assume that MWI is false.
MWI doesn't predict any different statistics than CI.
I too listened to the Sean Carroll podcast with David Albert. It seems
to me that Albert's objection to MWI was that it didn't involve any
uncertainty. If you take Everett's theory seriously then the future is
completely known, so probability doesn't enter into it. This is sort of
like JKC's objection to Bruno's question of whether you will find
yourself in Washington or Moscow. The answer turns on equivocation on
what is meant by "you". But I don't find this objection relevant. As
Carroll has noted the CI can be recovered from MWI simply by supposing
all the branches you don't experience as vanishing.
Brent
Brent
Bruce
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