In what sense does MWI fail to predict the Born Rule?

[DarMM]

Well it requires environmental noncontextuality and a few other assumptions. Caves's paper is in postscript and has a good breakdown of all the things Zurek's paper is assuming.

Again, Zurek has three versions of his proof. Two for Many-Worlds, One not. The one I linked is not a proof for Many-Worlds, but for the "Existential" Interpretation as discussed by Zurek in his chapter in the Oxford text I referenced.

 

[Michael Price]

Well it requires environmental noncontextuality and a few other assumptions. Caves's paper is in postscript and has a good breakdown of all the things Zurek's paper is assuming.

Again, Zurek has three versions of his proof. Two for Many-Worlds, One not. The one I linked is not a proof for Many-Worlds, but for the "Existential" Interpretation as discussed by Zurek in his chapter in the Oxford text I referenced.

Finally opened Caves' notes. He seems unhappy with the whole envariance business, and there's not much I can do about that. As for the MWI vs Existential interpretation - another red herring. The Born rule will work for any no-collapse approach, even the DBB pilot wave crowd.

 

[DarMM]

Finally opened Caves' notes. He seems unhappy with the whole envariance business, and there's not much I can do about that. As for the MWI vs Existential interpretation - another red herring. The Born rule will work for any no-collapse approach, even the DBB pilot wave crowd.

I'm not really sure what you're saying. In DeBroglie-Bohm, the Born rule follows from a form of thermalisation. This isn't really related to any form of demonstration of the Born Rule within MWI, I don't know how you can just declare that the Born rule will work for all no collapse approaches, since they each need very different kinds of demonstrations.

 

[Michael Price]

I'm not really sure what you're saying. In DeBroglie-Bohm, the Born rule follows from a form of thermalisation. This isn't really related to any form of demonstration of the Born Rule within MWI, I don't know how you can just declare that the Born rule will work for all no collapse approaches, since they each need very different kinds of demonstrations.

I'm referring to the idea that all pilot-wave theories are really many-worlds theories in denial - to quote D. Deutsch. The wavefunction never collapses in PW, and hence contains all the information present in Everett's MWI. So this Born Rule derivation should apply to them as well. Anyway, it is just a throw way comment, and I don't really want to take it any further - PW people just seem to get very angry when you try to explain the idea to them.

 

[DarMM]

I'm referring to the idea that all pilot-wave theories are really many-worlds theories in denial - to quote D. Deutsch. The wavefunction never collapses in PW, and hence contains all the information present in Everett's MWI. So this Born Rule derivation should apply to them as well. Anyway, it is just a throw way comment, and I don't really want to take it any further - PW people just seem to get very angry when you try to explain the idea to them.

Well regardless of how Pilot Wave advocates feel, I don't really see how this could be valid. In DeBroglie-Bohm we have a quantum potential $\Psi(x)$ with which the particle interacts. For most initial probability distributions, they will evolve to the distribution $\psi$ as a steady state, which obeys the Schrodinger equation. However at early times they will not.

So although the information is present in DeBroglie-Bohm, it means something very different. They're both psi-ontic interpretations, but that doesn't mean one is "really" the other.

 

[Michael Price]

But, as Everett pointed out, the particle in the pilot wave is superfluous in the sense that it can't be observed in any way. It should therefore be removed, leaving us with the pure MW theory. (Making its observation an axiom in the theory means the theory is inconsistent.)

 

[PeterDonis]

Thread closed for moderation; at this point it seems to be just people continuing to post their disagreement without any progress. The moderators will evaluate whether it's worth keeping the thread open.