On Thu, Apr 21, 2022 at 6:04 PM George Kahrimanis <gekah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> [...] until Alan Grayson sees the end of the race, or somebody tells >> Alan Grayson about it, Alan Grayson can't be certain what world Alan >> Grayson is in. Alan Grayson could be in a world where horse X won or Alan >> Grayson could be in a world where horse Y won, until Alan Grayson receives >> more information Alan Grayson would have to say the odds are 50-50. > > > *> If you mean that on sheer ignorance the odds are 50-50, we need some > clarifications.* If quantum mechanic says a photon must be either horizontally or vertically polarized, and it can provide no reason to favor one outcome over the other, then the odds are 50-50. Many Worlds would say that when the photon encounters the polarizer the universe splits into two, one universe contains a George Kahrimanis who sees a photon emerge from a polarizer oriented in the horizontal direction, and one universe contains a George Kahrimanis who does not see the photon emerge and concludes that before it hit the polarizer the photon must've been polarized in the vertical direction and was then destroyed. > > Strictly speaking, zero information implies "undefined probability", Sure, but thanks to quantum mechanics we are not completely clueless about what will happen when a photon of unknown polarization encounters a polarizer oriented in the horizontal direction, we can't be certain of the outcome but we can be certain of certain outcomes that are not possible, and we can obtain probabilities that are very useful about outcomes that ARE possible. > For the instrumentalists among us (glad to have you, BTW): the question > of interest to me is not about which way is best to derive probability from > QM -- that would be a pointless discussion, It would be pointless because we have known from experiment for nearly a century that the best way to obtain probability from quantum mechanics is to take the square of the absolute value of a particle's wave-function, a.k.a. the Born rule. >The question is whether all of them beg the question, so that we have to > think of a rational decision theory without probability. > Even in the days before quantum mechanics, as soon as physicists started thinking about thermodynamics they knew that a rational decision theory without probability was not viable. > > Although Everett's argument (whose improvement I have proposed) grants > that in the long run (that is, large samples) the Born Rule is practically > certain to apply, this is not technically the same as probability for each > single outcome -- though I admit that it works the same, I would argue that if X works the same as Y then technically X is Y. > for a RATIONAL decision theory this probability is not granted, *IF* that's true *THEN* a RATIONAL man will consistently make predictions about the outcome of an experiment that are inferior to the predictions that an IRRATIONAL man would make. So there would be no point to rationality or being "rational". *THEREFORE* I conclude that your above statement is not true. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> pbc arq -- 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 on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1P19RkhT9tvXE%2BGbyiSxC5%3DxrVR8qvqeA98Cx6ir3DqQ%40mail.gmail.com.
