On 2/11/2025 4:27 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
Bruce,
I'll still give it a try to get a discussion (dumb me).
If your response boils down to "this is nonsense" and "you’re not
clever enough," then you’re not engaging with the actual argument. The
question is not whether the Schrödinger equation explicitly encodes
the Born rule—it does not, just as it does not encode classical
probability either. The question is whether MWI can recover the Born
rule without adding collapse, and there are multiple serious
approaches to doing so.
Your claim that "MWI does not match experiments because it cannot get
the Born rule" is just an assertion. The Schrödinger equation does
evolve amplitudes, and those amplitudes do determine the structure of
the wavefunction. You dismiss measure as meaningless, yet every
quantum experiment confirms that the statistics follow . If naive
branch counting were correct, experiments would contradict the Born
rule—but they do not. That means something in MWI must account for it.
Saying "all branches exist equally" ignores what "equally" even means
in a probabilistic context. Probability is not about "some things
happen while others don’t"—that’s a description, not an explanation.
Classical probability arises because there are more ways for some
outcomes to occur than others. In MWI, the weight of a branch is not a
degree of existence—it’s a statement about how many copies of an
observer find themselves in that outcome.
If you have a counterargument, provide one—just dismissing the
approach as "fantasy" without addressing the core point doesn’t make
your position stronger. If you want to argue that MWI cannot recover
the Born rule, then you need to explain why all proposed derivations
(Deutsch-Wallace, Zurek’s envariance, self-locating uncertainty, etc.)
are fundamentally flawed, not just assert that they don’t count.
Let's see you explain the derivations. Then you see the problem: there
have been many attempts and they fail because they slip in assumptions
that are equivalent to assuming the Born rule; so it would take a pages
to of email to deal with each one. Here's a couple of papers that
covers most of them
https://pages.jh.edu/rrynasi1/HealeySeminar/literature/Vaidman2020DerivationsOfTheBornRule.pdf
https://faculty.up.edu/schlosshauer/publications/bornrule.pdf
Brent
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